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WOMEN OF THE SALONS 



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THE 

WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

AND 

OTHER FRENCH PORTRAITS 



BY 



S. G. TALLENTYREi, j^ 



WITH PORTRAITS 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 

NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 

1901 

All rights reserved 






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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

MADAME DU DEFFAND 1 

MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE .... 22 

MADAME GEOFFRIN 40 

MADAME D'lPINAY . 62 

MADAME NECKER 88 

MADAME DE STAEL 113 

MADAME R^CAMIER 134 

TRONCHIN : A GREAT DOCTOR 153 

THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 170 

MADAME DE S^VIGNE 204 

MADAME VIGfiE LE BRUN 223 



LIST OF PORTRAITS 



Madame Vig£e Le Brun Frontispiece 

From, the Portrait by herself in the Ujfizi Gallery at Florence. 
From a Photograph by G. Brogi, of Florence. 

Madame la Marquise du Deffand . . To face page 1 

From a Print in the Bibliotheque Rationale, 
Paris. 

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse ... „ „ 22 

From a Print in the Bibliotheque Nationale, 
Paris. 

Madame Geoffrin „ ,,40 

From a Print in the Bibliotheque Nationale, 
Paris. 

Madame d'Epinay „ „ 62 

From a Lithograph after Liotard in the British 
Museum. 

Madame Necker „ „ 88 

From an Engraving in the Bibliotheque Nationale, 
Paris. 

Madame de Stael „ „ 113 

From a Picture by F. Gerard in the Louvre. 

Madame R^camier „ „ 134 

From the Picture by J. L. David in the Louvre, 
Paris. 

Dr. Theodore Tronchin .... „ „ 153 

From a Print in the Bibliotheque Nationale, 
Paris. 

The Mother of Napoleon .... „ „ 170 

From a Picture by F. Gerard at Versailles. 

Madame de Se>igne" » » 204 

From the Portrait by Mignard in the Uffizt 
Gallery at Florence. From a Photo by 
G. Brogi, of Florence. 




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THE 

WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

MADAME DU DEFFAND 

"There used to be in Paris," says Sydney Smith, 
"under the old regime, a few women of brilliant 
talents who violated all the common duties of life, 
and gave very pleasant little suppers." There is no 
wittier description of the Salonieres. 

The Salon, as an institution, is wholly and exclusively 
French. The practical mind of England always wants 
to be doing. The mind of France is more easily con- 
tent to talk. In its Salons it talked to some purpose. 
They were the forcing-houses of the Revolution, the 
nursery of the Encyclopaedia, the antechamber of the 
Academie. Here were discussed Free thought and the 
Rights of Men, intrigues, politics, science, literature. 
Here one made love, reputations, bons-mots, epigrams. 
Here met the brilliancy, corruption, artificiality of old 
France, and the boundless enthusiasms which were to 
form a new. 

The Salonieres have passed, like their Salons, for 

A 



2 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

ever. In the rush and hurry of modern life there 
is no time even for women to make conversation a 
cultivated accomplishment. 

But one may well recall the lost mistresses of a lost 
art. For if they were too often, alas! corrupt, they 
were no more than any other human being, wholly 
corrupt. When one thinks of them, one must needs 
think too of a tact and kindliness most womanly and 
most rare, of hearts not a little generous, of ideals 
not always base, and of a wit, tenderness, and under- 
standing that must have made social life a witch's 
charm for care. 

Great among them was Madame du Deffand. 

Born Marie du Vichy Chamrond, she came into 
the world just three years earlier than that greater 
than herself — Voltaire. She was of the nobility. Her 
father, the Comte de Vichy, had a dull, noble estate 
in Burgundy. The Comtesse was, it would appear, a 
weak, colourless lady. Few details have been preserved 
about either of them. There was an aunt humpback, 
clever, and — contrary to the custom of her day — both 
unmarried and unconvented. Perhaps she was the 
vieille tante, whose philosophy of life Marie quoted 
when she was herself an old woman : " Pour supporter 
la vie, il fallait prendre le temps comme il vient, et 
les gens comme ils sont." 

The child was left early an orphan, and was sent, 
at six years old, a pretty, shrewd creature, to the 
Convent of La Madeleine de Trenel, at Paris, where 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 3 

she was badly taught, or at any rate learned very 
little. That she was capable of learning anything is 
certainly not to be doubted, since the girl is always 
even more the mother of the woman than the boy is 
father of the man. But learning bored her perhaps. 
Weren't there much more amusing ways of knowing 
all one need know than stupefying oneself over primers 
and text-books, and paying attention to the weak- 
minded instructions of those simple nuns ? The girl 
who was to become Madame du Deffand must have 
had even now that horror of dulness, regularity, and 
perseverance which was to be such a curse to her 
hereafter. " I was like Fontenelle," she said later, of 
these school days ; " I was hardly ten years old when 
I began to understand nothing." It was the confession 
of a cleverness which, since it could not find out all, 
would sit down with folded hands and not bother 
itself to find out anything. 

Marie was still a very young girl and a very pretty 
one at her convent when she alarmed the nuns and 
her relatives (and had a wicked pleasure in alarming 
them, no doubt) with a profession of infidel tendencies. 
The priest who was the girl's confessor argued with 
her, and Marie argued with him. She was the cleverer 
of the two, with that logic not to be taught by books, 
and the pious confessor was only zealous and shocked. 
Marie's good aunt, Madame de Luynes, became so dis- 
turbed presently by her niece's unbelief that she sent 
the great Massillon to catechise and convert this charm- 



4 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

ing heretic. And the heretic, who was a little bit 
awed by the fame and position of the preacher, was 
moved not at all by the strength of his reasoning, 
while the preacher — who was quite human, it appears, 
for all those magnificent denunciations of his which 
are as a god's, and will live for ever — was, on his 
side, more impressed by the gay charm of this wilful 
dawning womanhood than by the naughtiness of the 
scepticism. 

Marie found life very dull when she was grown up, 
and presently left the convent. What can one do in 
the country, after all ? The voices of Nature did not 
appeal to this brilliant girl. She already liked the 
voices of the world, of homage to her talent and to 
her beauty, so much better. Was it to get away from 
the horrible ennui of staring at fields and woods and 
the canaille of the starving country villages of 1718 
that she was so perfectly ready to fall in with the 
wishes of her relatives that she should be married ? 
She was so poor, too. She must marry somebody. 
She did not know any one to marry but the Colonel 
Marquis du Deffand de la Lande, who was the first 
person, most likely, who had made an offer for her 
hand. One could not expect that the woman of whom 
her truest friend said that her judgment on matters 
of conduct was almost always wrong, should, under 
the circumstances, refuse an eligible husband simply 
because she did not happen to care for him. It was 
in her character to be always dying for a new experi- 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 5 

ence, something to amuse her, to vary routine. She 
varied it at one -and -twenty by the Marquis du 
Deffand. 

He does not seem to have been a bad sort of man, 
this Marquis. Perhaps he was from the first something 
of the nonentity he was to be for future generations — 
overshadowed always by his brilliant wife, rather stupid, 
rather indifferent, and dully philosophic. Or it may 
be, instead, that just at first, while his novelty had 
not worn off, Marie found him positively interesting, 
was pleasantly amused with her experiment, and 
troubled herself to be as entertaining and as delight- 
ful as she and a few of those gifted social contem- 
poraries of hers alone knew how. 

There are but the barest records remaining of her 
childhood and youth ; and of those early days of her 
marriage, none. One must fill in the blanks from 
what is known of a later Madame du Deffand, and 
then one guesses what a frank, witty, outspoken, im- 
perious, impossible wife the Marquis had made the 
mistake of choosing. How long was it before she 
began to find him a little bit monotonous ? He did 
not do anything objectionable, it would seem. He 
was certainly not unkind. His only fault, perhaps, 
was that he had not taken into consideration the 
impetuous self-indulgence of his wife's character, her 
entire want of self-control, or the most elementary 
sense of duty. She found him a " tiresome com- 
panion," and left him. In all the history of ill-assorted 



6 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

marriages one will hardly find so candid and simple 
a reason for a separation. 

She went to Paris, threw herself into the quick life 
there, and satisfied her soul — or at least deadened the 
melancholy that even now must sometimes have pos- 
sessed it — with pleasures. She visited everywhere; 
such a beautiful, witty Marquise carried her passport 
in her face and her intellect to almost any society. 
That queer separation about which everybody was 
talking only lent her an additional charm. It was 
so bizarre ! The Marquise herself had the very good 
taste not to allude to it ; and no doubt took care that 
it was only behind her back other people should dis- 
cuss it either. She was still not more than two or 
three and twenty, very beautiful, daring, and im- 
prudent, alone in a society where a woman needed 
a protector if ever a woman did; very much sought 
after, very much flattered, very gay, very delightful. 
She went to little suppers at court — that vile and 
gorgeous court of the Eegent, where one would have 
given anything and done anything for the companion- 
ship of a witty woman, who would relieve the awful 
satiety which follows unbroken pleasure, and bring to 
those heated rooms and those jaded minds a fresh 
humour, a new spirit, a piquant story. There were 
other little Royal suppers, too, more private, to which 
Madame also went presently. 

It is on the testimony of one man alone that she 
was for a brief fortnight the object, and the willing 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 7 

object, of the Regent's degrading passion. But when 
one reflects that the man who tells the story was 
her sincere friend and confidant, and remembers the 
shamelessness of that society in which she shone, the 
statement seems but too likely to be true. It did not 
degrade the Marquise in the eyes of her friends. 
Most of the friends were not themselves in a position 
to be greatly shocked at such irregularities. All Paris 
was still at her feet when she retired for a while to the 
Chateau de la Riviere at Bourdet, and began to give 
those clever little suppers which were presently to 
make her name, and the whole interest of her life. 

As the Marquise was not well off, it seemed thought- 
ful of her grandmother to die presently and leave her 
a little fortune. The first delicious novelty of those 
supper parties and of Bourdet had worn off. Madame 
was looking about for a new sensation. Suppose she 
tried a reconciliation with the Marquis ! There could 
hardly have been a better moment, now that she had 
become comparatively rich. This woman's heart was 
always frank and generous, and alien to many of the 
pettier vices. Had she a feeling somewhere far down 
in it, too, that she had treated her husband — well, 
suppose one says rather cavalierly, and now she had 
an excuse for making amends, would make them ? 
She rushed into her scheme in the most character- 
istically impulsive, hot-headed fashion. The pair had 
agreed on a six months' novitiate which the Marquis 
was spending at his father's house. And Madame 



8 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

broke through it impatiently, received the gay compli- 
ments of all Paris on the reunion, and dragged the 
Marquis, as it were, home at once. What was the good 
of delaying one's happiness ? Prudence ? Forethought ? 
The words were not in her vocabulary. The two lived 
in a " beautiful friendship " for quite six weeks. At the 
close of that time, Madame, at her end of the table, 
became ever so little triste and distraite; looked out 
of the window and sighed ; responded to the Marquis's 
well-meant efforts at conversation with a fine melan- 
choly; was more absent-minded still the next day; 
frankly ennuied a third ; a little tearful a fourth ; and 
so gently and despairingly wretched at last, that, as a 
gentleman, the only thing the Marquis could do was 
to return to his father. Isn't it like the scene in a 
little French comedy ? They did not quarrel. Quarrel- 
ling is so bourgeois. They had even in this very difficult 
relationship the most exquisite tact, finish, politesse — 
and as for duty and self-control, no one could expect to 
find these in a mocking little lever de rideau. After 
the parting Madame dissolved into floods of the most 
bewitching tears. There is mention of an old lover 
whom she had had to displace to make way for the 
Marquis. It was all quite complete. The inimitable 
Parisienne who played the heroine — the dull husband 
— that suggestion of some one else in the background. 
All Paris laughed out loud. Nothing could have 
appealed more completely to the light-hearted cynicism 
of that inconsistent age. They did not disagree, you 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 9 

understand. But they were so consummately bored! 
And Paris laughed afresh till it could laugh no more. 

To console her new loneliness, Madame visited a 
great deal presently at Sceaux, where the Duchesse 
du Maine (who said she liked society because everybody 
listened to her, and she did not listen to anybody) 
had her "galeres du bel esprit." Here was Voltaire, 
lean and brilliant, and Mademoiselle de Launay, not yet 
married to Monsieur de Staal. Here came, possibly, 
Madame d'Epinay, and certainly Madame de Lambert. 
La Mothe and the Abbe de Polignac talked together in one 
corner. Here the " divine Ludovise," the granddaughter 
of the great Conde, held her little court. And there, 
brilliantly ignorant and enchantingly naive and frank, 
Madame du Deffand was making the acquaintance of 
that supreme egoist, the President Henault. There was 
hardly a woman in the company who had a shred of repu- 
tation left her, nor one who was not perfectly witty and 
delightful. It cannot surprise anybody who knows the 
punctiliously careful immorality of this age, when vile- 
ness was hedged about with so much form and etiquette 
and decorum, as to be horribly confused in men's minds 
with virtue, that Madame du Deffand should have 
thought that the best way of clearing her honour — 
which really had suffered a little from her futile 
attempt to be reconciled to her husband — was to set 
up "ce qu'on appelait son menage avec le President." 
When she went later to stay at the Eaux des Forges 
she and the President exchanged long letters filled with 



10 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

minute details about their health, and with sentences 
which show that Madame was not a bit blind to her new 
friend's defects. Perhaps he really was now, as he cer- 
tainly was later, a friend only. Perhaps even in this 
topsy-turvy world of unpurified France — what wonder 
that its evil could only be washed out with blood ? — 
the most charitable conclusion was still the least likely 
to be wrong. The Marquise, at any rate, was never a 
wholly vicious woman. She was at this time three- 
and-thirty. What she said of herself many years later 
was now, as then, the real key to her character, " Je 
m'ennuyais ; de la toutes mes sottises." 

She got tired of Sceaux, as it was her doom to get 
tired of everything. Why should she bother herself to 
illuminate somebody else's Salon ? She was brilliant 
enough, alone, to light one of her own. She had already 
given a few very gay little supper-parties, after her return 
from Forges, at her lodging in the Rue de Beaune, and 
welcomed there Voltaire and his Madame du Chatelet, 
Henault, and Newton. Their success had stimulated 
her ambition. Sceaux was more irksome than ever when 
she went back to it — as she still did perfunctorily some- 
times — although d'Alembert, that fickle, womanish 
genius whom Madame protected and loved not a little 
disinterestedly presently, was now of its company. 

The time, of course, was not long in coming before 
she broke with Sceaux entirely. She took apartments 
in the Rue St. Dominique, in the Convent St. Joseph — 
apartments which had nothing conventual about them, 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 11 

one may be quite sure — and, in the room once occupied 
by Madame de Montespan, started those "Soupers de 
Lundi " which became the rage. 

This was, or should have been, the happiest time in 
Madame's life. Her social success was brilliant. She 
was in the splendid prime of her womanhood. She was 
always either entertaining or being entertained. "I was 
at supper ce soir . . . chez;Madame de la Nalliere, demain 
. . . aux Beauveau, hier chez le President." Everybody 
wanted her, must have wanted her. She was so amus- 
ing, so outspoken, so mechante. And still so bizarre ! 
When her husband came to die, she went to take fare- 
well of him as of a dear friend. No one but a French- 
woman, and a Frenchwoman of this extraordinary 
period, could have survived such a situation. She held 
his hand, very likely, and apologised from quite a frank 
heart for having been — so whimsical. How much or 
how little remorse there may have been in her secret 
soul, God knows. She flung herself into the full tide 
of life again and forgot. 

Was it only that she was affected by a more than 
usually passionate fit of ennui, that a day came when 
she suddenly abandoned her social gatherings, the sup- 
pers, the wits, with a shriek, as it were : hid her eyes 
from the lights and the glitter of the brilliant Paris she 
had loved, and took refuge in her brother's house in 
the country? Voltaire pursued her with madrigals, 
and her lesser friends with a thousand persuasions to 
return. But she was deaf to all alike. A horrible fear 



12 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

had overwhelmed her. With what a torture of doubt 
and terror the suspicion grew daily nearer certainty! 
Her mind was a great deal too clear and straightforward 
to permit much self-deceit. It must have needed all 
the courage of the woman, to whom boredom was the 
supreme evil, to face the fact that she was going blind. 

There was no wonder, with this doom before her, 
that her solitary heart had a sudden dreadful eagerness 
for affection, for some one to cling to, to depend upon. 
In her brother's house, as governess to his little boys, 
there was a certain Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, poor 
and clever, born in ignominy, young, proud, passionate, 
and charming. It was only natural that the two bril- 
liant women should take a fancy to each other. Apart 
from the cruel fate, daily coming nearer, which the 
Marquise had to expect, she was now fifty-five years old, 
and must in any case have been in need of companion- 
ship. Were my brother the Comte and my sister-in- 
law the Comtesse a little bit too dull and correct for 
this woman, whose life had been neither ? Mademoiselle 
interested her, anyhow, more than any other person in 
the house. A stain on her birth ? Why, that was quite 
correctly romantic, and exactly like the beginning of a 
novel. (Madame was devoted to novels — they were so 
little trouble to the intellect to read.) In an ambiguous 
position in a rich man's house ? Delightful ! Impulsive 
and uncontrolled ? So much the better. Mademoiselle 
had already arranged to leave the Marquis de Vichy's 
service, and was living at Lyons upon twelve pounds a 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 13 

year when she received Madame du Deffand's offer of 
a home in the Convent St. Joseph, and an annuity of 
four hundred livres. 

The Marquise went back, then, in 1753 to her Paris, 
and to her little suppers in the Rue St. Dominique, in 
spite of her affliction, which she had accepted with not a 
little fortitude and philosophy. " I am blind, Madame," 
she wrote to the Duchesse de Luynes. " I am praised 
for my courage, but what should I gain by despair ? " 
In the spring of 1754 Mademoiselle de Lespinasse came 
to Paris, and for ten years helped her benefactress to 
entertain the most brilliant society of the age. 

One can but hope that the Marquise found her new 
venture, for a while, satisfactory. The marvel is not 
that these two undisciplined natures disagreed at last, 
but that they did not disagree from the first. Madame's 
character was, one knows, quite frank, selfish, and ill- 
regulated; Mademoiselle's belongs to another history. 
They fell into that old, old mistake very likely, which 
makes it so commonly impossible for women to live 
together — they wouldn't leave each other enough inde- 
pendence of opinion and action. When the Marquise 
found at last that her companion had started a rival 
Salon — in Madame's own room, and at an earlier hour 
than Madame held her own — the final quarrel burst 
into fire. The bonds of affection must have been often 
weakened by minor disagreements before this incident 
snapped them for ever. There was a fine stormy 
scene. Mademoiselle threatened to take poison — did 



14 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

take just enough to make herself and everybody else 
uncomfortable. They parted. Mademoiselle took with 
her half the allegiance of many of Madame's court, and 
all the faithless fidelity of d'Alembert. 

It is not a little painful to think of the old woman 
— she was now nearly seventy — blind and baffled, left 
sitting alone, with how many dreadful idle hours to 
think over the desertion of this dear friend, and mis- 
trust the faith of that! Henault proposed marriage 
to the Lespinasse, it is said. All the philosophers were 
against this old Marquise — either because she would 
not accept their philosophy, or because the philosophers 
too were but men and preferred the grace of youth 
to the cleverest old age. But Madame was not to be 
crushed. Society was still breath to her body, light 
to her blind eyes, life to her soul. She plucked up a 
spirit. She had still some faithful friends, her nightly 
gathering of celebrities, and then the intimacy of one 
of the wittiest Englishmen who ever lived. 

Look into her Salon at this time, on a Sunday even- 
ing perhaps, somewhere in the small hours. For all 
the late desertions, here was a company so uniquely 
brilliant, that as one watches it one understands what 
Talleyrand meant when he said that no one could 
conceive what a delightful thing life could be unless 
he had belonged to the French aristocracy before the 
Revolution. Here was Horace Walpole, smart and 
gouty, with his fluent bad French and his infinite 
sense of humour. Here was the President, very clever, 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 15 

very deaf, and not yet openly false. Here were the 
Neckers, my Lord Bath, Gibbon, George Selwyn, Lord 
Carlisle, the delightful Duchesse de Choiseul, the 
Duchesse de Luxembourg ("very handsome, very 
abandoned, very mischievous"), possibly Charles Fox, 
and a dozen minor celebrities. What a feast of 
epigram was here ! On whatever subject these people 
talked, they talked brilliantly. Lord Bath found that 
they knew more about the history of England "than 
we do ourselves." They evolved couplets, quatrains, 
caracteres. Every other word was a bon-mot. These 
lions did not all roar together and drown each other 
as the British lions do. French wit was still the most 
graceful, the most subtle, the most delicate, the most 
tactful, the most considerate wit in the world. This 
company had the perfection of good manners, if it had 
no other kind of perfection. There is, perhaps, no 
wonder that with the strong dawn of a utilitarian age 
such an institution as the Salon should have faded 
for ever. Those hard people whose only business it 
is to act have long blotted out the class whose chief 
business it was to talk. 

From her armchair, quite blind and very far-seeing, 
Madame led that matchless company and conversation 
with the easiest grace. She scarcely ever left the house 
in the daytime now. At night, unless she was enter- 
taining at home, she was always at a party elsewhere, 
or at the opera, the theatre, or Versailles. She had 
the habit of never getting up until six o'clock in the 



16 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

evening, like the wicked nobleman in a story-book. 
In the mornings an old soldier from the Invalides 
came to read aloud to her. She kept Wiart, her 
secretary, busily employed; wrote by him innumer- 
able letters to Horace Walpole when he went back to 
England. 

Madame's relations to this man were, it would seem, 
not a little pathetic. In the ordinary acceptation of 
the word she was not, perhaps, in love with him. She 
was many years his senior. But then, too, she was 
dreadfully alone in the world — with the saddest need of 
human affection and the saddest lack of it in her life. 
Her letters are filled with that impulsive warmhearted- 
ness in which there is no kind of dignity. "I want 
you," she says in effect. " I may make myself ridicu- 
lous by such an affection; but what do I care, what 
have I ever cared, for that ? " And when he responded 
with that quiet prudence and carefulness for which one 
can but respect him, " You ! " she says, " you ! Why, 
you are a man of stone, of ice — in a word, an English- 
man ! " And, at last, " Pouvez vous ignorer ? mais . . . 
je me tais." 

She did not indeed — it was not in her character — 
subdue herself at all satisfactorily for more than a few 
days. The feelings of her undisciplined old heart came 
bubbling up through her accounts of the Du Barri or 
the Dauphiness Marie Antoinette, through her shrewd 
opinions of the books that had been read to her, and 
her notes on Salons and suppers. Horace was the one 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 17 

passion of her life of which she did not live long enough 
to be cured. 

As her years advanced, that fatal ennui which was 
her curse, gathered its forces to overwhelm her. Books 
bored her now. They were so long and so trite and so 
like each other ! Throw them away. For this, too, is 
vanity. Her old friends were dead. She had outlived 
many even of her old acquaintances. The zest of an 
enemy or two was wanting soon. When they told her 
the Lespinasse was dead she only said, " If she had died 
sixteen years earlier I should not have lost d'Alembert." 
The President, too, had gone the way of all flesh. Oh, 
what a doom to sit alone amid the ruins of yester- 
day's feast with the other guests departed, and jaded 
memories of the banquet for all one's comfort ! " I 
have no passion of any kind," wrote the Marquise to 
Walpole, "hardly any taste for anything; no talents; 
no curiosity . . . que faut-il done que je fasse?" And 
when he replied in attempts at consolation, "I thank 
you for your good advice," said she. " I am old, deaf, 
blind. I wish I could take it ; but that cannot be." It 
was the acme of hopelessness. 

Even the society to which she clung palled upon her 
at length. As she sat in that old tonneau of hers, the 
wit fell on her ears, flat, stale, and unprofitable. How 
well she knew the tricks of expression and manner 
which gild dulness even, or make so little cleverness 
seem so much. To despise the world to the full, one 
must be a worldling. God ! what a death before 



18 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

death, to see the vanity and emptiness of the life one 
has chosen, and yet to have no hope beyond it ! This 
woman was quite without religion. She had tried to 
be devote, and failed. She was sceptical even of scepti- 
cism. Call in the guests, then ; multiply the suppers ; 
laugh, talk, jest, that one may escape a little that 
" blank stare of the grave." Anything was better than 
those blind, sleepless nights of dreadful retrospect and 
shuddering anticipation. In the dead of them, the 
blind woman sat up and tried to occupy her brain 
mechanically by making verses. In the morning there 
would be at least life, stir, movement, the preparation 
for the company of the evening. But the nights — not 
all the precepts of the preachers are so awful a sermon 
as the latter end of this Marquise. 

In the July and August of 1780 she complained of 
being more than usually feeble and languid. Her 
friends Madame de Choiseul and the Duchesse de 
Luxembourg came often to see her, and did perhaps 
the very little any human creature could do for her 
now. Her companion, Mademoiselle Samadon, was 
quite dutiful and uninteresting. Her servants had a 
passionate attachment for her, not founded on the 
virtues and stability of her character, nor yet hard to 
understand. On August 22, 1780, she wrote her last 
letter to Horace Walpole. " I have not enough 
strength now even to be afraid of death," she said; 
" and, except that I shall never see you again, I have 
nothing to regret." 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 19 

From that day she never rose from her bed. She 
had no illness, hardly any bodily suffering. But she 
was tired to her soul. The ante-room was full of in- 
quirers who had been the habitue's of those brilliant 
suppers. But what could these people do for her now ? 
A little while before her death she heard Wiart weeping 
by her bed. " You love me, then ? " she said, with a 
pitiful astonishment that any human creature could care 
for what must have been troublesome and a burden too 
often. When he asked her if she suffered, she replied, 
" No, no." She sank at last into lethargy, and from 
lethargy very gently into death. That supreme weari- 
ness, called life, was finished. 

How should one judge the character of such a 
woman ? She was the princess of the fairy tale who 
was given at her birth all the gifts of the gods save one 
— the power of turning the others to account. All her 
friends — and she had many — spoke of her warm and 
generous heart, her instinct which was almost genius, 
her ready wit and tact, her clear, honest insight, her 
bold and independent judgment. In a very artificial 
age she was quite unaffected and downright, and 
retained to her last hours an extraordinary naivete 
and freshness. If she could have disabused herself of 
the idea — an idea common in all the French upper 
classes before the Revolution — that life is intended to 
be an amusement, this Marquise might have been great 
too. But to escape ennui she married in haste, forfeited 
her honour, debased her soul, committed a thousand 



20 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

daily meannesses, wasted her powers, and ended a 
fine example of her own aphorism that " Happiness 
is the philosopher's stone which ruins those who 
seek it." 

As for her mind, it was one with which all but 
the very solemn will have at least some sympathy. 
Madame hated metaphysics, morals, and philosophy. 
She liked to jump at conclusions (and always jumped 
at the right ones) instead of arriving at them solidly 
by the stupid, beaten track of learning and experience. 
She loved anecdotes or a gossipy book of memoirs — 
only it must be gossipy. History? Well, one is 
obliged to read a little history, because it helps one to 
know men, which is " the only science that excites my 
curiosity." She was dreadfully bored by "Clarissa 
Harlowe," which is ever so much too long, said Madame, 
though she was almost the only critic of her day who 
found that out. Buffon she thought of an insupport- 
able monotony, and " Telemaque " wearisome to death ; 
hated " Don Quixote," and did not find anything in 
the vivid imagination of "Gulliver" to appeal to her 
particularly common-sense old mind. There was, at 
least, no humbug about Madame's opinions. She 
yawned dreadfully over Milton, as many other persons 
have yawned over him without the courage to say so. 
She had a very un-French insight into the weakness of 
her own nation, and estimated it — gay, bright, shallow, 
delightful — quite soundly. Nor had she the slightest 
hesitation in observing that that famous Jean- Jacques 



MADAME DU DEFFAND 21 

everybody was raving about was disagreeable to her; 
that she had never seen anything more contrary to 
good sense than his " Emile," or to good manners than 
his " Heloise," and nothing in the world quite so dull 
and obscure as his " Contrat Social." 

She had the very good sense, considering the position 
of all her class, not to be at all fanatical for liberty, 
which, after all, said she, and as if she could see into 
that wild future, is not to be found in democracy, where 
one has a thousand tyrants in place of one. " I always 
hated the people," she says again, " and now I detest 
them." Well for her, perhaps, that she did not live to 
see that day when the people sat in dreadful judgment 
upon such utterances as these. Her letters are as 
candid and impulsive as herself. When she had a 
great deal to say, she said it ; and when she had nothing 
to say, she stopped. When she felt hopeless, she wrote 
hopelessly ; and when she felt scandalously, she wrote 
scandal. But she also made that famous old regime live 
once more. She was herself an embodiment of its spirit, 
and a type impossible to any other age or nation. In 
her one sees its mad thirst for pleasure; its feelings 
after truth ; its fine principles and its faulty practice ; its 
wit, spirit, humour ; its profligacy, selfishness, despair. 
And with her, something of the charm which made 
it delightful and of the candour which sweetened its 
corruption, went into darkness for ever. 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 

When some student of the heart gathers together the 
love stories of the world, he must not forget the letters 
of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. 

Mademoiselle lives, and will live, not as the most 
brilliant and sympathetic leader of the brilliant society 
of France before the Revolution, not as the mistress of 
d'Alembert, the confidante of Turgot, or the hostess of 
the philosophers, the Encyclopaedists, and the Academi- 
cians, but as the woman who sounded all the depths 
and shoals of emotion and left behind her a cor- 
respondence which is still warm with life and wet with 
tears — an immortal picture of passion. 

Mademoiselle's beginning was like her ending — like her 
youth and her womanhood — a storm. The mother who 
bore her in shame and secrecy wept over her and loved 
her with that ungoverned affection which can bring 
nothing but misery. She was baptized in a false name ; 
entered, with an exact duplicity which deceived nobody, 
in the baptismal register dated Lyons 1732, as the 
legitimate daughter of the Sieur Claude Lespinasse, 
bourgeois, and Julie Navare. Her real mother, the 
Comtesse d'Albon, though she could not own her as her 
child, took the little creature not the less to her home in 




' //</(/<■ //u>/Je//r (/< -~Ss'.i/i{ ?t.(f->->< 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 23 

the old manor-house of Avanches, where she was living 
apart from her husband. The little Julie had as com- 
panion the eight-year-old Cainille, the Comtesse's son 
and heir. Is it safe to suppose that the children — 
equally innocent though not equally fortunate — played 
together happily for a while ? or must one rather think 
that that passionate and restless nature which was to 
ruin an older Mademoiselle Lespinasse made even her 
childhood wayward, fretful, and unsatisfied ? 

She spoke many years after of her mother's affection 
for her, of the impulsive and sorrowful tenderness which 
tried to make up to the child for that fatal stain on her 
birth — for the future which such a beginning must 
bring. The little girl was surely still very young when 
she found out that there was some difference — a fatal 
difference, which a child feels all the more because it 
cannot understand — between her brother and herself. 
The Comtesse " heaped her with benefits." She educated 
her herself with an "excellent education." She did 
everything in her power to make wrong come right. 

Mademoiselle was sixteen years old when her mother 
died and left her, worse than an orphan, to the tender 
mercies of the world. 

It was from this time that the oirl dated all her 
sorrows. But they began earlier. The}^ began with 
herself. When she looked round her condition was 
deplorable enough. The considerable sum the Comtesse 
had left her she had given, with an impulsive generosity 
quite unwise and characteristic, to Camille. Perhaps 



24 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

she reflected he had more right to it than she had — or 
never reflected at all. She found herself almost a 
beggar. She had indeed brilliant talents, but not the 
talents which earn a livelihood in any time, and cer- 
tainly not dn her time. She was very quick, bright, and 
impetuQus. Not a person for a subordinate position 
this. She had grown up into a tall slip of a girl, not at 
all pretty, but with something even now in her face 
beside which beauty left one cold. She was so impres- 
sionable, so sensitive, a brilliant creature with her nerves 
so highly strung and her heart so warm, rebellious, and 
imprudent, that one does not need to be very clever to 
guess that when the Marquise de Vichy Chamrond (the 
Comtesse's legitimate daughter and Julie's senior by 
many years) offered her a home in her house, where she 
was to teach her little boys, and by no means forget that 
she had no legal right to call her sister, the situation 
would be wholly impossible. But Julie had no choice 
but to take it. Perhaps she did not know as yet that 
the Marquise, though more than kin, was less than 
kind.- And she had herself such a charming sympa- 
thetic affection for children ! " They have so many 
graces, so much tenderness, so much nature," she wrote 
long after. She took those small nephews to her heart 
at once, and, when she had long parted from their 
parents in anger and bitterness, remembered the little 
boys with a fond affection. 

The Vichy Chamronds had a great house on the 
Loire. They naturally did not want this brilliant poor 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 25 

relation. They showed her that they did not want her. 
But they were afraid of letting her go elsewhere. If she 
was generous they were not. They were suspicious of 
her ridiculous liberality to Camille. Did she want to 
thrust herself in among them and claim her mother's 
name? They accused her, very likely, of subterfuge 
and meanness, of which their hearts were capable, 
but not hers. How she bore that galling servitude 
for five years is a marvel. "I could tell you things 
from my own experience," said she, looking back at 
this period of her life, " that you will not find in the 
wildest romances of Prevost or of Richardson . . . and 
that would give you a horror of the human species." 
In every utterance of Mademoiselle's one must allow 
for exaggeration. Her emotions were always at fever 
heat, and her language as undisciplined as her nature. 
But it remains a fact that she had decided to leave her 
only' home and enter a convent, when Madame du 
DefTand, the sister of the Marquis, came to the house 
for a long summer visit. 

Mademoiselle fell in love immediately with this 
brilliant old woman, and Madame fell in love with her. 
They were both so clever, so impulsive, so romantic ! 
The delightfulness of their sudden fine scheme of living 
together was only heightened by the Vichy Chamronds' 
opposition. Madame was threatened with blindness, and 
really needed a companion. No one ever appealed to 
Julie's sympathies in vain. She had never in her life 
been anything so dull as judicious or far-seeing, and had 



26 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

the warmest heart in the world. She could not but feel, 
too, that, for her, any change must be for the better. 

A few days before her final rupture with the Vichy 
Chamronds she received Madame du Deffand's written 
proposal that she should live with her in Paris. She 
went to Lyons, and existed somehow on the cent e'cus 
which was her whole fortune while the final arrange- 
ments were being made, the objections of Camille and 
the Vichy Chamronds being overcome, and Madame 
du DefTand trying to be cool and judicial, and discuss 
the matter soberly with her friends. One can fancy 
the delights, fears, hopes, which rose in Mademoiselle's 
heart. She was now twenty-two years old. The girl, 
who felt-within herself a power and brilliancy not given 
to one woman in a thousand, was to be the companion 
of the mistress of one of the most famous Salons in 
Paris, and to associate daily with the most accomplished 
society in the world. What was there left to desire ? 

The history of that menage in the Convent St. Joseph 
was from the first not a little strange. All the wit of 
the wittiest capital in Europe gathered round two 
women, one of whom was old and blind, and the other an 
obscure and nameless dependant, who had neither beauty 
nor fame. Madame rose very late, and received after 
nine o'clock at night. Mademoiselle had her little 
chamber de derriere. Here, in her many solitary 
hours, she cultivated her mind with Locke, Tacitus, 
Montesquieu, Montaigne, Racine, La Fontaine, Voltaire ; 
read, and re-read, and read once more her dearest Rich- 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 27 

ardson and the inimitable Prevost; and cultivated a 
boundless enthusiasm for Rousseau. When was it that 
the men, whom to know was a liberal education, first 
discovered that Mademoiselle was something better 
even than a divinely sympathetic listener ? When was 
it that Mademoiselle first began to neglect her duty to 
her benefactress, and forgot that she was here to please 
Madame rather than Madame's friends ? There was no 
woman in the world, perhaps, who would have been 
superior to the delight of subjugating, by a charm which 
had no need of beauty, such men as Turgot, Marmontel, 
Henault, and d'Alembert. Or if there was such a 
woman, it was certainly not Mademoiselle. These men 
met her soon upon equal terms. Between five and six 
o'clock in the evening Mademoiselle held in that famous 
little chamber de derriere, her own Salon, composed of 
Madame's adherents, and while Madame slept. 

She had lived with her employer ten years — and 
deceived her how many there is no means of finding 
out — when one day the Marquise, waking earlier than 
usual, came to Mademoiselle's room, and discovered all. 

One can picture the scene very well. Here were 
Henault, who had been the old woman's lover, and 
d'Alembert, who had been as her son — the pride, joy, 
tenderness, of her age. Here was the company who 
once hung on her words, who sought inspiration from 
her lips, and found in her sympathy sufficient. And in 
their midst, with light in her eyes, ardour and anima- 
tion on her face, was Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. 



28 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

This was, as it must needs have been, the end of all 
things. 

The two women reproached each other bitterly. 
Mademoiselle was not a little hysterical. She took 
enough opium to ruin her nerves for the rest of her life, 
and to make her fancy herself dying. When Madame 
came to her bedside, " II est trop tard," said the Les- 
pinasse with her tragic instinct. It was too late for any 
reconciliation to be possible. The older and wiser woman 
recognised that from the first. Mademoiselle took rooms 
not very far from the Convent St. Joseph, and once more 
faced the world alone. 

It was during those ten years that the influence which 
was to mould and then shatter her life had first come to 
her. Mademoiselle fell in love. It is said that a certain 
Irishman who visited at Madame du Deffand's was her 
earliest passion. It may have been so. But it is un- 
doubtedly a fact that for the last seven years of her 
residence with the Marquise she was attached to 
d'Alembert. How could they help caring for each 
other ? There was so much to draw them together. 
They were both, wrote d'Alembert, without parents, 
without relatives, and from their birth had experienced 
neglect, suffering, injustice. D'Alembert, too, was one 
of the most celebrated men of his age, already a member 
of the Academy of Sciences, of the Academie Francaise, 
and to be before long its perpetual secretary, and the 
recognised chief of the Encyclopaedists. And he was 
also, it may be added, one of those inconsequent, sensi- 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 29 

tive geniuses, as little able to look after himself as a 
child, and with the same appeal that a child has to a 
woman's heart. Mademoiselle must have been in her 
early twenties when they first met. 

" Que de defauts elle a, cette jeunesse ! 
On l'aime avec ces defauts-la ! " 

quoted d'Alembert long after, looking back at this 
spring-time. She loved him with that abandon and 
that passionate sincerity which made her love irre- 
sistible. The rooms she had taken were too far from 
the house where he lodged for her impetuousness. She 
endured the separation for something less than a year. 
Then d'Alembert fell ill. Mademoiselle flung prudence 
to the winds for ever, went to him in the hotel in the 
Boulevard du Temple, nursed him back to health, and 
brought him home with her. 

From this point one must not look into her history 
for any such dull steadfast things as self-restraint, 
honour, decency. The torrent of her passions seized 
her and swept her to ruin. She was not designedly 
bad. She was not designedly anything. Her impulses 
and desires were her rudder, and her shipwreck none 
the less disastrous for that. 

Writing of the early days of this manage, Made- 
moiselle said that her happiness frightened her. 

There seem indeed — suppose one leaves out duty and 
conscience, and this pair left them out quite comfort- 
ably — to have been but few drawbacks. Only David 



30 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Hume, the historian, passing through Paris and coming 
to see them, spoke bluntly of Mademoiselle by a name 
which she deserved too well. The rest of her acquaint- 
ance, with that careful self-deceit which was so damning 
a characteristic of the age, conveniently accepted the 
intimacy as perfectly innocent, and visited Mademoi- 
selle exactly as before. 

It was a little while before d'Alembert joined her, and 
in the year 1764, that she opened her Salon in her little 
rooms in the Rue de Belle Chasse. She was now thirty- 
two years old. She was certainly not more beautiful than 
she had been as a girl. If the emotions age, she must 
have looked greatly older than she was. She had known 
so many ! But her face, which never was young, had a 
thousand varying expressions to describe her soul ; and 
her heart, which was never old, such warm enthusiasms, 
such generous indignations, and such an abundance of 
life and feeling, as, said one of her lovers, would have 
made marble sensitive and matter think. 

Her gatherings could hardly have needed the addi- 
tional attraction of a d'Alembert even. Those who came 
presently to see him stayed to listen to her. The chief 
of all the Encyclopaedists, and the most brilliant talker 
of his age, might be well content to be second to the 
woman who but a little while ago was nobody and 
nothing, and who now, by the power of her mind and 
the charm of her nature, had all witty Paris at her 
feet. 

It is extraordinary to think that this woman, or any 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 31 

woman, could command such an assemblage almost 
every night for nearly twelve years. She did not even 
give the little suppers which helped Madame du Def- 
fand's Mondays, or the little dinners of Madame Geoffrin. 
Should she by any chance go into the country or to the 
theatre, all Paris knew beforehand. Before five she 
received her intimates, listened, as only Mademoiselle 
could listen, to Turgot's plans of reform, or to the hopes 
of Chastellux for his coming election. After five all the 
world was admitted. 

The meanest habitues of this Salon were the flower 
of intellectual France of the eighteenth century. Here 
came courtiers, philosophers, soldiers, churchmen. Here 
were Bernardin de St. Pierre and La Harpe. Here 
one listened to those splendid theories on humanity 
and the Rights of Men which, put into practice, ended 
in the Terror. Here were evolved some of the prin- 
ciples of that Revolution which was to destroy first 
of all the class who evolved them. Here one read 
aloud the last play and the latest poem. One might 
be grave or gay as one chose. There was all the 
good in the world, thought Mademoiselle, in a little 
mirth and lightness. She held in her slight hands 
the threads of a dozen widely differing conversations, 
and had the supreme gift of being to every one exactly 
what he wished her to be. 

Can't one fancy her, very tall and slight, moving 
through the crowded rooms with her little dog at 
her side, stopping to speak now to this man and 



32 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

now to that, with her heart always in what she said, 
a little impetuous in speech, keenly sensitive to the 
lightest change in the social atmosphere, very natural, 
very animated, very quick? When people talked to 
her they never felt how clever she was, but how 
clever they were. It was Guibert who said of her 
that she seemed to know the secret of all characters 
and the measure of every one's mind. 

Is it some fine scheme for the good of the people this 
group are discussing? It must be, by the upturned 
face, eager and tender, with which Mademoiselle listens 
to them. She moves in a few minutes to another 
little coterie which is philosophic or metaphysical 
perhaps; and Mademoiselle has a passion for abstruse 
thought. Over here they are talking music, or art. 
The woman of whom it is said that she can appreciate 
perfectly, each in its degree, a Rubens or the little 
dead bird of Houdon, the famous painter on enamel, 
brings into this conversation, as she brings into all 
conversations, the warmth of human emotions and 
the vivid charm of her inimitable personality. Her 
contemporaries unite in speaking of her, as hostess 
and friend, with such a glow of enthusiasm that after 
more than a hundred years one still feels for her 
something of the passion they did. 

It was in 1767, and only three years after she had 
given herself to d'Alembert, that Mademoiselle fell 
violently in love— with the Marquis de Mora. The 
Marquis was Spanish, ardent, chivalrous, and five- 



I 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 33 

and- twenty. Mademoiselle was ten years older. But 
what did that matter ? Passion has no age, and, it 
may be added, no sense of humour. With the 
southern blood of de Mora on the one side, and 
the vehemence of Mademoiselle on the other, it would 
have been in vain to expect self-restraint from either 
of them. The peaceful d'Alembert was quickly swept 
aside by the rush of their feelings. His only use 
soon was to listen to the story — though not all the 
story — of Mademoiselle's devotion to his rival. When 
de Mora came back from Ferney, where he had 
been visiting Voltaire, she flung herself into his arms 
with a delirious self-abandonment. The fever of this 
attachment lasted for five years, during which Made- 
moiselle never knew a rational moment. Then de 
Mora, with the seeds of a fatal complaint already 
within him, had to go back to Spain. 

They parted in an agony of despair. It was 
d'Alembert who fetched his rival's letters, and brought 
them to Mademoiselle directly she was awake. And 
it was to d'Alembert that she left as a legacy her 
papers containing the history of the episode and 
the certain proofs of her faithlessness to him. 

What a pitiful story it is ! One is hardly surprised 
to hear that Mademoiselle did not wait for de Mora's 
death to betray him in his turn. Before that news 
reached her Guibert was her lover, and the first 
wild hours of a new passion had robbed her of the 
last tattered shreds of her self-respect. Guibert was 



34 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

soldier, author, philosopher — the man of whom Voltaire 
said " qu'il veut aller a la gloire par tous les chemins." 

It was in her own Salon Mademoiselle had first met 
him. He was known to every one by his Essai sur la 
Tactique and his military feats in Corsica ; and half 
the women in Paris listened, worshipping, while he 
read aloud his new tragedy, Le Connttable de Bourbon. 
With his connection with Mademoiselle began the cor- 
respondence by which she lives. 

The letters were from the first a cry. The mental 
attitude of the woman who wrote them to Guibert, from 
the house of d'Alembert, and in terms of an ecstatic 
devotion for de Mora, may well baffle the student 
of human nature. Yet there is not a page of 
Mademoiselle's wild outbursts which does not bear 
upon it the undeniable stamp of a vehement sincerity. 
Her attachment to d'Alembert had no doubt cooled 
before this into friendship. But her very first letter 
unites a headlong devotion to Guibert with a passionate 
love for de Mora and a wild remorse for the fatality 
(Mademoiselle called it a fatality) which made her false 
to him. It is not too much to say that of these letters 
there is not one quiet, sane, or prudent. Though they 
are written in that purest French in which Made- 
moiselle thought and talked, they are" in no sense a 
literary composition. They are only the bared heart 
of that unhappy woman who said of herself, "Mon 
Dieu ! que la passion m'est naturelle, et que la raison 
m'est etrangere ! " 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 35 

Guibert was travelling in Germany when she began 
writing to him, not because he was obliged to travel, 
but because he preferred it apparently to being in Paris 
with her. She wrote to him constantly. She was 
never quite sure of him, as it were. Did she remember 
too often for her peace that she was forty years old, and 
had neither beauty nor innocence to give him ? Her 
letters were full of devotion, indeed; but then they 
were full too of self-reproach — and of M. de Mora. 
This woman had no subtlety. If it needed art to keep 
her lover, sne would not keep him. The thought oi 
him was with her always. While her passions lasted, 
they were meat, drink, air, light, life to her. Even in 
her Salon, "From the moment one loves," she says, 
" success becomes a weariness. A-t-on besoin de plaire 
quand on est aimee ? " The emotions of .the last years 
had already begun to undermine her health. She was 
thinner and paler and older-looking now than ever. 
With d'Alembert she was not a little difficult and 
capricious — full of those impatient imperfections which 
first made him love her and kept him weakly faithful 
to the end. She had known Guibert but a very little 
while when the inevitable punishment of such a con- 
nection fell, as always, upon the woman. The excess ot 
her devotion bored hiuO He must have a little recrea- 
tion after all. There was a certain Monsieur de Cour- 
celles — with a daughter. One knows the end of that 
story. 

Mademoiselle received it, not the less, with a shriek. 



36 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

One can see her face, wild, haggard, and despairing, 
through the reproaches she writes to him. " You have 
made me know all the torments of the damned," she 
says, "repentance, hatred, jealousy, remorse, self-con- 
tempt." And Guibert answers to tell her of that other 
person, "pretty, gentle, sensitive, who loves me, and 
whom I am created to love." There is no cruelty 
so complete and so selfish as the cruelty of a great 
happiness. 

On September 23, 1775, Mademoiselle wrote to 
Guibert : " Perhaps one never consoles oneself for great 
humiliations. I wish that your marriage shall make 
you as happy as it has made me wretched ; " and then, 
" You are married ; you have loved, love, will love one 
whose brightness and strength of feeling have long 
endeared her to you — that is in order, nature, duty 
— and who would trouble your joy with questionings 
must be fool indeed. Quand une fois le fil de la verite 
a ete rompu, il ne faut pas le raj outer; cela va toujours 
mal." 

Her health was by now utterly broken and wretched. 
It was her part to stand by and watch the happiness 
which had ruined hers. She was long past pride, past 
dignity, past honour. She went on writing constantly 
to the man who had abandoned her, conscious that she 
wearied and burdened him — bitter in her reproaches 
and her self-reproach — and contemptuous of the wasted 
love she was not noble enough to hide. Her body was 
racked by cough and fever. But the soul which fretted 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 37 

it to decay had the brilliancy of the last flame. She 
still received her friends, had still that tender interest, 
that perfect understanding, that divine sympathy which 
were hers alone. She was in bed all day sometimes, 
with her misery soothed by opium, and got up at 
night to listen to this man's hopes of a noble future, to 
splendid enthusiasms which were to redeem the world. 
One last flicker of self-respect came to her before she 
died. She would no longer ask Guibert to come and 
see her. Sickness and sorrow are so dull ! " Point de 
sacrifice, mon ami; les malades repoussent les efforts; 
ils leur font si peu ! " 

She would not have been Mademoiselle if that re- 
solution had lasted and her pride had triumphed over 
her passion to the end. 

She asked d'Alembert's pardon before she died. But 
the last words she wrote were to Guibert : " Adieu, mon 
ami. Si jamais je revenois a la vie, j'aimerois encore a 
l'employer a vous aimer ; mais il n y a plus de temps." 

Before such a tragedy as this life one may well pause. 
What was this woman ? A sinner. But if there ever 
was a sinner in the world unmeet for compassion, it 
was not Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. 

She said of herself with a bitter truth that every- 
thing was against her. Her birth of shame gave to 
her, as to too many other creatures so born, a fatal 
heritage of vehement passions,, without the strength 
to control them. Her upbringing did not help her. 
Injustice maddened her. Her splendid mental gifts 



38 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

brought her under the potent charm of those specious 
philosophies which were enthusiastic for a virtue more 
than half confused with vice, and of philosophers who 
appeared to think that so long as they talked finely 
they might live contemptibly. Her quick impulses 
and " the most inflammable imagination since Sappho ' 
led her to deeper ruin. She was capable of remorse, 
and not of amendment; of noble ideas, without the 
steadfastness to carry them into action. She was the 
ship without ballast, without compass, without chart, 
tossed by every wild gust of feeling — no anchor, no 
port to make for, and at the helm no guide. 

She pointed, indeed, her own moral. She sold her 
soul for happiness, and gained fever, wretchedness, and 
despair. Her passions hid, even from her dreams, that 
better love in whose serene depths are mirrored peace, 
honour, and content: faithful affection for husband 
and children, the quiet striving after all things great, 
a noble life, and a happy death. D'Alembert, for 
whom she had long ceased to care, was true to her; 
de Mora died ; Guibert was false (his fine Eloge 
d'Miza rings as hollow as d'Alembert's " Lament " 
rings true). Her letters are only so many witnesses 
to her tragedy. It was she who spoke of " cette 
maladie si lente et si cruelle qu'on nomme la vie." 
" I have proved the truth of what Rousseau says : 
' There are moments in life which have neither words 
nor tears.' " " How misery concentrates ! One wants 
so little when one has lost all." " Diderot is right ; it 



MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE 39 

is only the unhappy who know how to love ; " and " To 
love and be loved is the happiness of heaven ; when one 
has known it and lost it, there remains but to die." 

She stands out, in brief, as one of the saddest 
instances in history of the disaster that must needs 
ensue where the paramount idea of life is not duty — 
that duty which can make the most unfortunate 
passion not all ignoble, and teach one to build on the 
ruins of one's own hopes a temple meet for the gods. 

She stands out, too, as one of the most extraordinary 
social figures of the most remarkable social epoch the 
world has seen. She rose from nothing. She had no 
money. (" It is only the bored and the stupid who need 
to be rich," said she.) She had very bad health ; and 
her lover, though he spoke of her as having that in 
her face beside which beauty is a " cold perfection," 
spoke not the less frankly of her laideur. Yet as long 
as the Salon is remembered, so long will be remembered 
the woman who ruled hers by the power of exquisite 
sympathy and the most womanly genius that ever 
woman had. And so long as there exist unrequited 
or misplaced affection, sin, suffering, and disappoint- 
ment, so long will the letters of Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse make their appeal to the heart. 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 

One of the intimates of Madame Geoffrin remarked 
one day in her Salon that everything was perfect chez 
elle except the cream. 

" What will you ? " said Madame. " I cannot change 
my niilkwoman." 
" Why not ? " 

" Because I have given her two cows." 
" Voila," says a biographer, " le rare et le delicat." 
The incident was, indeed, quite characteristic of the 
woman whose motto was " Donner et parflonner," who 
had a tact that was almost genius, and a heart so kind, 
tender, honest, and generous that there is not one of 
the Salonieres upon whose memory it is pleasanter to 
linger. 

Marie Therese Rodet was born at Paris in 1699. 
She was, says one authority, the daughter of a valet de 
chambre of the Dauphine ; while another has it that 
the valet was of Dauphigny. Everybody is agreed that 
her origin was entirely obscure and bourgeoise. Her 
parents died when she was in her cradle. She was 
brought up, but not educated, by a shrewd and illiterate 
old grandmother, who had a theory that if a woman is 
a fool learning will only accentuate her folly, and that 

40 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 41 

if she is clever she will do well enough without it. 
There is something to be said for this idea. 

At fifteen Marie married a M. Geoffrin, who was also 
bourgeois, enormously wealthy, and a lieutenant-colonel 
of the National Guard. They had a daughter, after- 
wards the Marquise de la Ferte-Imbault. M. Geoffrin 
died. With the exception of one famous visit to the 
King of Poland at Warsaw, Madame never left Paris, 
even for a day. She held there the Salon which has 
made her famous, and died there full of years and 
honour in 1777. 

This greatest of all the Salonieres had, therefore, no 
history. That is, if outward events make a history. 
But there are some people who could write the incidents 
of their life on a thumb-nail, and who yet have known 
great emotions, exercised wide influence, and left behind 
them a more lasting reputation than many kings and 
dynasties. Perhaps Madame Geoffrin was one of these. 

There are so few records of the early part of her 
life, that what she was in her brief girlhood is mostly 
a matter of conjecture. She does not seem to have 
wished to learn any more than the clever old grand- 
mother wished to teach. She had no masters. She 
never even knew how to spell. But she was made to 
read — and to read much — and, what is better than all 
the reading in the world, to think. She was very 
little instructed in facts, and a great deal in principles ; 
versed in no science but the science of human nature ; 
shown how to look at things simply as they are ; and 



42 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

certainly not left in the arid condition of the pedante 
who, having stuffed her head full of information, leaves 
quite uncultivated her heart, her tact, her sympathy, 
and that deeper wisdom which is not of books. The 
little Marie, too, had always before her the example of 
the humorous and clear-minded old bourgeoise, who 
" talked so pleasantly of the things she did not know that 
no one ever wished she knew them better," and who at 
least, if results are to be trusted, showed the grandchild 
that noblest of the arts — how to live well. 

Can't one fancy what a very bright, modest, sensible 
little girl this Marie was likely to have been when at 
fifteen she married her M. Geoffrin? The marriage 
seems to have been the usual mariage de convenance, 
inevitable at that date. Monsieur was a dull, heavy, 
honest, ugly person. There is one little story to the 
effect that in studying the Encyclopaedia, printed in 
two columns, he read straight across the page, and 
remarked afterwards that the book seemed very fair, 
but a trifle obscure; and another little story to the 
effect that he would read the first volume of a history 
or book of travels, written in several volumes, over and 
over asrain, and then wonder that the author should so 
much repeat himself. The stories are not true, very 
likely; but if they are, one cannot but think that 
even this stupidity had, as it were, its own especial 
appeal to the wide, kindly heart of the girlish wife. 
It is only a very shallow cleverness that is annoyed 
at stupidity after all. It is your wise people who can 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 43 

afford to treat it very gently — seeing how little it is the 
wisest can know — and who would have a fellow-feeling 
for that worthy, silent old manufacturer of ices (this 
was M. Geoffrin's trade) at the head of the table, trying 
vainly to catch the sense of the witty, elusive talk going 
on round him, and not a little thankful to get back to 
solitude, where he could be as unintellectual as he felt 
inclined, and practise comfortably on his tromjpette 
marine by the hour together. 

There is no evidence to show that Madame did not 
treat Monsieur with at least as much sympathy and 
thoughtfulness as she treated all the world. He gave 
her great wealth, for which a woman who so loved to 
make others happy could not but be grateful. Her 
beautiful rooms were full of perfect statuary and pic- 
tures. She was enabled, and already beginning, to 
entertain her friends. This little bourgeoise, with her 
fine talent for order and decorum, must needs have 
regulated her husband's home well and happily. 
Though he was a nonentity, a respectable old figure- 
head to her guests, it does not follow he was nothing 
more to her. The stranger who inquired presently 
what had become of the old man who used to be at 
Madame's dinners, and was now there no more, and 
was met by the reply, " C'etait mon mari ; il est mort," 
represented the attitude towards M. Geoffrin of some 
of Madame's friends, but not that of Madame herself. 

It is said that she received what may be called her 
training for her Salon from the clever and corrupt 



44 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Madame de Tencin. That may have been. No train- 
ing, however brilliant, could have fitted a woman un- 
fitted in heart and character to be, not merely the 
hostess, but the friend, confidante, mother as it were, 
of the most brilliant genius of the eighteenth century. 

The Salon of Madame GeofFrin is one of the wonders 
of the social world. She had no position. She could 
claim as father a valet de chambre in an age when the 
aristocracy would not touch the canaille with the tips 
of their white fingers. She was wealthy, indeed, but 
in a time when all the noblesse were also wealthy (with 
their rich places and perquisites and blood-money from 
the taxes), so that there was not then, as now, an 
acknowledged aristocracy of bullion. Her trompette 
marine, with his fortune made in trade, was no great 
help to her. She was not beautiful. She had little, 
gentle, old-maidish ways that never even let her seem 
young. She was respectable when decorum of manner 
was highly unpopular and taken to be a tacit reproach, 
in the very worst taste, upon modish levity. She was, 
as has been seen, uneducated. 

And to her rooms soon flocked savants, philosophers, 
artists, nobles, princes, ambassadors, politicians, re- 
formers. On Monday one dined here — the perfection 
of a little dinner, simple, suitable, well chosen — the 
guests mostly painters and sculptors. What did 
Madame know about art ? Nothing, except what a 
refined natural taste could teach her. On Wednesdays 
the dinner was literary — Marmontel, Holbach, d'Alem- 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 45 

bert, Gibbon, Hume, Horace Walpole, and the only 
woman besides the hostess, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. 
Can't one hear the conversation ? Madame Geoffrin 
had the supreme art of making other people talk their 
best. She knew just where to put in a word or to ask 
a question. She had in perfection that finer accom- 
plishment — how to listen. She might very well have 
known more about books than she did. But it was 
impossible that she should have sympathised better 
with the makers of books, their hopes, cares, fears, 
ambition. These men told her their difficulties. She 
advised them, helped them, cheered them. She was 
their good angel — quite a human good angel, with 
that prim exactness about her dress, lavender-scented, 
dainty, quiet, with her spotless muslins about her 
neck, the little cap tied under her chin — the very 
soul of gentle good sense, gay, kind, wise, natural, 
orderly. 

After the dinners she received all her world. What 
an assembly it was ! This Salon was at once the most 
catholic and the most particular of all the Salons. 
Here, it is said, sovereigns met their people. The aris- 
tocracy of genius was brought close to the aristocracy 
of birth. Was one clever, poor, obscure, or titled and 
famous? The two met on common ground and were 
both the better. Here were Montesquieu, Voltaire, 
Diderot, Algarotti, and Lord Shelbourne. Stanislas 
Augustus, afterwards King of Poland, was a " host " of 
the company, and brought in his train the Polish nobles 



46 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

and notabilities of the day. Here d'Alembert met 
often his fatal passion, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. 
Here was Grimm, who had come straight from another 
and a very different Salon and influence, that of his 
mistress, Madame d'fepinay. Horace Walpole, perhaps, 
had been at Madame du Deffand's. 

In this corner one was complimenting Bernardin de 
Saint- Pierre on his Paul et Virginie, " that swan song 
of old dying France." In another there was a group of 
laughing girls, for Madame loved such as they loved 
her. Women of fashion talked with the rugged old 
bourgeois reformers, who first of all should have re- 
formed their class and character. The broken French 
of those "foreigners of distinction," who never passed 
through Paris without visiting Madame Geoffrin, was 
audible everywhere. Vanloo and Vernet were looking 
at the priceless pictures and statuary, bought out of 
the trompette's ice-money. And over all, the genius of 
good taste, good order, good sense, presided that woman 
who was well called the " invisible Providence " of her 
assemblies, Madame Geoffrin. 

Though she must have been very young when she 
first began to receive a society more illustrious than 
any since the days of Madame de Rambouillet, she had 
from the very first the quiet sageness of middle life, 
and that aversion to change, hastiness, and discord 
which one does not associate with youth. Were they 
talking politics ? Madame knew nothing of politics. 
They made people bitter, argumentative, quarrelsome. 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 47 

She listened a little while, then, when the discussion 
grew too heated, interposed with her "Voila qui est 
bien." That was her oil on troubled waters, her 
password to harmony, fairness, and reason. In her 
rooms there was always a calm, though it were but 
the calm before the storm. The distant rumble of 
the thunder of that tempest that was soon to burst 
over France was not heard in this quiet place. By 
Madame's fireside, indeed, and under Madame's peace- 
ful influence, one whispered of those doctrines which 
would presently bouleverser the world. But it was the 
writers, not the actors, of that great drama who gathered 
here, and when they got too fiery and hot-headed in 
their discussions, as some needs must, they drifted away 
naturally from the gathering of Madame Geoffrin to the 
greater liberty allowed by Holbach and Helvetius. 

Madame had a little supper-party for a few chosen 
intimates when her world had gone away. She did not 
even now talk much herself — only interposed now and 
then with a gay little story or a kind little axiom. All 
her sayings were kind, it seems. It is not so difficult to 
be witty if one is permitted to be a little bitter too. But 
to be witty, and to see persistently the best side of 
people and motives, is by no means so easy. If Madame 
had believed less in her friends she could not have 
helped them half so much. It is not hard to under- 
stand why these impulsive, brilliant Frenchmen came 
to this wise little bourgeoise with their confidences and 
confessions. She scolded them well, a part, when the 



48 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

supper was over; but she understood them perfectly, 
and had the charity that believeth and hopeth all 
things, and that makes the most fallen once more 
believe and hope in himself. 

All her friends .were not, of course, brilliant people. 
Was it Madame Geoffrin Shenstone was thinking of 
in particular when he wrote of the Frenchwoman in 
general ? — " There is a quality in which no woman in the 
world can compete with her — it is the power of intel- 
lectual irritation. She will draw wit out of a fool." There 
is a charming story told of Madame Geoffrin, who found 
herself tete-a-tete for a whole long winter evening with a 
worthy and unsufferable old bore of an abbe. What 
was to be done ? Yawn in each other's faces ? Die of 
tristesse and ennui under a mask of social smiles ? 
Madame, " inspired by the desperate situation," set her- 
self to work to make the bore amusing ; and succeeded 
so well that when he left her she gave him a little com- 
pliment on his " bonne conversation." " Madame," said 
he, "I am only the instrument on which you have 
played beautifully." 

This was the key at once to her character and to 
her social success. She " played beautifully " the noble 
music of the great masters on instruments from which 
others only extracted the vile jingle of street songs 
or the fierce passions of the "Marseillaise." She did 
not only draw cleverness from the stupid, but good- 
ness from the corrupt. Instead of the licence and 
indecency of the gatherings of Mademoiselle Quinault, 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 49 

there were her modest little suppers, where even 
Burigny, her dear major-domo, was not required to 
keep order, because she knew so well how to keep it 
herself. She still stands out, with her carefully regu- 
lated home and her serene mind, as the noblest high- 
priestess of decency and right. She still gives the 
lie to the delusion (which even now obtains in her 
country, if one must judge by its fiction and plays) 
that virtue must be stupid. If in reading of her, with 
that lack of events in her history and that gentle 
regularity in her daily life, she seems dull even for 
a moment, the fault lies only with her biographer, 
and not with the woman who for fifty years was as 
a mother, beloved, worshipped, honoured by the most 
brilliant spirits of her age. 

It was in her own Salon that she first learnt that 
affection, which she carried with her to her grave, for 
Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, afterwards King of 
Poland. He appears to have been an honest, well- 
intentioned person, not at all incapable of warm 
feelings, or at all adequate to the tremendous situa- 
tion in which he found himself. To Madame he was 
her fits and her bien aime. A prince ? A king-elect ? 
A king ? What did that matter ? He was first of 
all, as it were, her son. She had the gift of looking 
straight through the trappings of royalty, fame, posi- 
tion, at the man within them. 

In 1764 the Cabinets of Petersburg and Berlin set 
him on the Polish throne, and Madame wrote to him 

D 



50 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

as "Sire" and "Majesty," and regarded him for ever 
as the child who wanted help and sympathy on a 
difficult way, with whom one might quarrel a little, 
but whom, feeble or strong, in or out of power, one 
must needs love to the end. 

.The letters the pair exchanged are not remarkable 
as literary compositions. Madame's are full of the 
faults of orthography for which she was famous. They 
have very few of the blithe little anecdotes and epi- 
grams which made her conversation delightful. She 
was writing to a man always in danger, fear, difficulty ; 
and was herself the most sympathetic of women. So 
what would one have? They have no great political 
interest, or only that feminine view of politics which 
always centres on the politician. But they are not 
the less letters which even a king might have been 
glad to have received. If any one will look back on 
some cherished correspondence of his own, he will find 
in it, it may be pretty safely said, less wit and brilliancy 
even than Stanislas found in Madame Geoffrin's. It 
is only posterity which demands cleverness, and com- 
ment on contemporary history in a letter ; the receiver 
only needs the touch of the writer's hand, the assurance 
of affection and faithfulness, and the reminder that the 
only real separation is that which causes no pain. 

Madame had been corresponding with her son and 
king only a few months when the idea of visiting him 
at Warsaw took possession of her heart. She was now 
sixty-five years old. She had never been out of Paris 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 51 

in her life. She had preferred her ruisseau de la 
rue de Saint-Honore to all the splendid places of 
the world. The difficulties of travelling in that time 
are hardly estimable. She had no one to go with her. 
Her daughter was married and had her own ties. 
Madame had to tear herself from a Salon of perhaps 
forty years' standing. But the idea grew,, and then 
dominated her. She and her king had a quarrel on 
paper, and the scheme seemed likely to be abandoned. 
They had a reconciliation, and their reunion was the 
necessary consequence. One has to be a woman, per- 
haps, and to understand that maternal yearning in 
every woman's heart, to realise the absorbing nature 
of the desire to see her bien aime again which 
made Madame Geoffrin pursue her plan against every- 
body's advice, and carry it out in the teeth of diffi- 
culty. Her bien aime himself had been more than a 
little doubtful about his chere maman attempting a 
journey so hazardous. He had warned her often of 
the drawbacks she would find. He would do his best 
for her — she should be infinitely honoured and beloved 
— but drawbacks there would be; and she paid no 
attention to his cautions — or, rather, listened to them 
and persisted. 

In the end of June 1766, escorted by the Comte de 
Loyko, chamberlain to Stanislas, Madame Geoffrin, 
bourgeoise, started with an almost royal progress, and 
with, it is said, the eyes of Europe upon her, on the 
first stage of her travels. Can't one see her looking 



52 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

out from the windows of that berline, built for the 
occasion, upon the new world ? A widely travelled 
generation can hardly fancy the excitement and eager- 
ness, doubt, fear, anticipation which such a journey 
must have represented in the mind of a woman who 
belonged to the most stay-at-home people of a stay- 
at-home age. And behold, this was Vienna ! Not 
Paris, indeed, but not all contemptible. Madame 
parted here from Loyko, who was replaced by the 
Captain Bachone, who spoke all languages, and was 
prepared, it appears, to travel with suites of furniture, 
cooks, provisions, silver plate, to render Madame's 
journey as little inconvenient as might be. At Vienna 
the greatest nobility of the land received this clever, 
dignified daughter of the people with their very best 
parties and welcome. Maria Theresa showed her the 
finest kindness and sympathy. She saw all the 
Austrian Royal Family — "the prettiest thing one can 
imagine " — at Schoenbrunn. Here was the young 
Marie Antoinette, hardly twelve years old, and already 
lovely as an angel. "The Archduchess told me to 
write to France and say I have seen her, this little 
one, and find her beautiful." Was this the first foot- 
step of that grim destiny which was to overtake " the 
Austrian," falling on the threshold of her life? "Arriere- 
petite-fille du roi de France." "Lovely as an angel." 
"Write to your country and say you found her so." 
It would have been but a part of the fitness of fate 
that one of the first little nails in the coffin of 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 53 

monarchy and of the queen should have been driven 
there by the daughter of a valet de chambre. 

Madame would have been sorry to leave Vienna, no 
doubt, if she could have had room for such a feeling as 
sorrow in her heart when she was getting nearer every 
hour to this son of her age and her affection. She 
had expressed herself so warmly and decidedly in that 
quarrel they had had ! She was so anxious to see him, 
and tell him that she would not have been half so 
angry if she had loved him less. To her serene nature 
the omnipotence of fate or death to dash the cup of 
realisation from one's lips, even at the last moment, was 
not so vivid as to a less sanguine temperament. She 
looked forward to their meeting with a sure heart. 
They were to be so happy, son and mother once more — 
a French son and mother, be it understood, between 
whom is that intimacy and confidence not half so well 
known to the relationship in other countries. He was 
to tell her what he had done, was doing, was going to 
do. They would talk over his marriage, his prospects, 
his thousand daily difficulties in that stormy kingdom, 
which needed the strongest man at its head, and had a 
very amiable one. She would advise him, scold him, 
help him. She did not know much about his Polish 
politics, but she could learn. She was all for him, and 
not at all for herself. She wanted no advancement, no 
place for her friends, no influence used here or word 
spoken there — nothing but the good of one person, 
Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski. 



54 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

No one who has lived long in the world will wonder 
that this meeting at Warsaw did not fulfil all it pro- 
mised. It is a truism, but not less a truth, that the 
only unalloyed happiness in life is anticipation, and that 
the happiest people are those whose dreams are un- 
realised. These two, who loved each other sincerely, 
disagreed upon a thousand minor and immaterial points, 
as many other sincere lovers have done before and after 
them. They could not consent to differ. (Has one 
ever met a woman who could let a man think differ- 
ently from her without dragging that difference to the 
fore, and discussing and threshing it out a hundred 
times a day ?) Madame suffered not a little. Stanislas 
lodged her with splendour and honour. She obtained 
— if that was any advantage — a very good idea of the 
tottering state of this poor little kingdom, torn by 
internal dissension, the plaything of the greater Powers. 
She received during her stay in Poland letters from 
Voltaire and Marmontel. Her whole visit there lasted 
only a little more than two months. When she was 
back again in Paris she was able to write of it with 
enthusiasm. But there were not the less those clouds 
on her happiness. When she had gone away Stanislas 
wrote in terms of a passionate regret, and she answered 
him from Vienna that the " tu " in which he addressed 
her was an " illusion of Satan," and recalled " all that I 
have suffered." There had been, it is said, influences at 
work upon the king which Madame dreaded for him, 
and of which she could not persuade him to rid himself. 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 55 

They would love each other better when they were 
separated. It is from a distance that one obtains the 
best view of a city. Too near, one sees the defects of a 
part, and not the beauty of the whole. 

The pair resumed their correspondence with all their 
old fervour when Madame was back again in her Paris. 
She sympathised once more with all Stanislas' difficul- 
ties and trials, which did not get fewer as the years went 
on. She was now, as ever, the genius of common-sense 
and quiet reason — calm, far-seeing, judicious. Petty 
jealousies were quite forgotten in the very real and 
daily growing need Stanislas had of her faithful friend- 
ship. In 1769 she was able to write to him, "When one 
is young, one's pleasure, passions, tastes even, form 
attachments and break them. My feeling for you de- 
pends on none of these things ; therefore it has lasted. 
It has lasted in spite of candour and plain speaking, 
and will last to the end of my life." 

Madame was now seventy years old. Famine, finan- 
cial disorder, and parties in the Court and Government, 
who sacrificed the public good to gratify private malice, 
made the condition of France appear deplorable, even 
to a woman whose nature was at all times gently 
optimistic. But the misfortunes of her own country 
were light beside those of her king's. 

In 1772 took place the first partition of Poland. By 
1792, when the second partition broke Poniatowski's 
heart, and he retired to Petersburg, to live there till his 
death in 1798 with, it is said, no consolation but that 



56 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

taste for letters he had learnt of Madame Geoffrin, she 
had long gone the way of all flesh. She wrote to him 
so long as she could handle a pen, loved him as long as 
she had a heart to love with, and in her last letter to 
him told him that she could not express her joy at 
leaving him happy and content. So that even Fate 
is sometimes merciful. 

The close of Madame Geoffrin's life was like its be- 
ginning, well ordered and regular. She continued to 
receive her friends in her Salon when she was a very 
old woman. In the summer of 1776 she was attacked 
by paralysis. The attack was brought on, say some, by 
too close an attendance at a church festival. It may 
have been. Though Madame had been the intimate of 
the philosophers, had listened many times in her rooms 
to the free expression of free-thought, and had been a 
warm patroness of the Encyclopaedia, yet it was not a 
little in keeping with the tranquil conservatism of her 
character that orthodoxy should have claimed her at 
last. Her daughter, Madame la Marquise de la Ferte- 
Imbault, who was properly aristocratic and conven- 
tional, took possession of her mother's bed, and would 
not let those adventurous souls, Morellet, d'Alembert, 
Marmontel, come near it. The sick woman was past 
troubling at their exclusion; or, perhaps, like many 
others, after having in life reasoned and wondered, was 
glad to die in the bosom of that Church whose great 
attraction to the soul is that it admits no doubts, saying 
with that self-confidence which gives confidence, " Be- 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 57 

hold, I am the Truth ! Rest in me." Madame at least 
only smiled when she learned that her daughter was 
thus "guarding her tomb from the infidels." It was 
thought that her reason was dimmed a little. But she 
was able to make her preparations for death gaiement, 
almost as she had made them for her journey to Poland. 
She had been always gently cheerful, and she was cheer- 
ful now. When she overheard the people about her 
bed making fine suggestions of the means Government 
might employ to make the masses happy, she roused 
herself to say: "Ajoutez-y le soin de procurer les 
plaisirs." It was her last recorded utterance. 

The character of Madame Geoffrin is quite simple. 
She was less a great woman than a good one. A great 
woman is the phoenix who rises from the ashes of her 
sex's littleness once in a thousand years, and is in pro- 
portion to great men about one to a hundred. Madame 
did not electrify the world. But she left her corner of 
it fairer, kinder, wiser; made by her character and 
influence a cool oasis, very pleasant to rest in, in the 
desert of French philosophy, atheism, and immorality. 

A thousand stories are told of her generosity, her 
tact, her honesty. The very people whom her bourgeois 
decorum and soberness must most have reproached 
could not but like her. " I am so crazy, and she is so 
prudent," wrote Galiani to Madame Necker. "Still I 
love her, I esteem her, I reverence her, I adore her." 
Others, if none more contemptible and licentious than 
the witty abbe, had the same feeling. 



58 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Horace Walpole called her his director, his confessor, 
the embodiment of common-sense. To be censured by 
the Sorbonne, or shut up in the Bastille for one's violent 
opinions, was almost the only form of folly Madame 
could not forgive her friends. 

Quiet was the chief of her household gods. Speaking 
to Diderot of a lawsuit that was bothering her : " Get 
done with my lawsuit," said she. " They want money ? 
I have it. Give them money. What better use can I 
make of my money than to buy peace with it ? " 

She did, indeed, make better use of it even than that. 
She is the most generous woman in history. It was 
she who allowed Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, who had 
no kind of claim upon her, a pension for life. It was 
she who paid Poniatowski's debts when he first came, 
a young man and a foolish one, to Paris. When she 
visited her friends it was her tender pleasure to look 
round their rooms and see what was wanting to com- 
pleteness, and afterwards to contribute a piece of old 
china, a picture, a couch, or a bureau. She had such a 
delight in giving, that he would have been surly indeed 
who could have refused to accept. 

To Morellet and to Thomas she made a sufficient 
allowance " pour leur faire une existence independante." 
How many more of those poor devils of authors who 
frequented her Salon, and had such very fine notions on 
life and so very little idea how to live, she helped from 
that wide purse and heart, one can only guess. One 
Sunday — on Sundays she did not receive her friends — 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 59 

one of them took her by surprise, and found her doing 
up a considerable sum of money in little bags for distri- 
bution among the poor. It was her regular Sunday occu- 
pation. For here, in evil Paris, with its great gulf fixed 
between class and class, there were so many sick who 
needed the necessaries — of death — so many orphaned 
babies, so many despairing women ! If Madame, who 
did " good by stealth," was convicted of so much kind- 
ness, how much more must there have been of which 
no one knew ! She was fond of quoting that Eastern 
proverb: "Si tu fais du bien jette-le dans la mer, et si 
les poissons l'avalent Dieu s'en souviendra ; " and when 
she was found out in goodness, past denial, excused 
herself by saying, with her gay little smile, she had 
only Vhumeur donnante. 

But she had, indeed, that nobler generosity of soul 
of which giving is but a small part. It was Madame 
who first stretched out a hand of friendship to Madame 
Necker, whom as yet the other women would not ac- 
cept. And it was Madame who remained her friend 
when the Necker, who was, besides, young and hand- 
some, presided over a dangerously successful rival Salon. 
It was Madame Geoffrin who was, in brief, beloved of 
women, though she was also beloved of men ; who could 
not bear the false change of compliments, eulogy, flat- 
tery, and clung instead to the frank affection of that 
generous youth, to whom, as to childhood, all men are 
equal, and all the world seems kind. 

There is no prettier picture than that Madame herself 



60 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

draws, with her natural illiterate pen, in one of the 
letters to Stanislas. Among her closest friends were a 
troop of laughing girls, who came and took her by sur- 
prise when they wanted to be amused. It was not here, 
volatile youth that was to cheer old age, but this gently 
gay old age ( " Mon coeur n'a que vingt ans," said 
Madame) which was to make youth merrier yet. One 
may imagine the scene. They cluster round her, chat- 
tering and impulsive. They are so light-hearted and 
demonstrative, so eager to make confidences, so sus- 
ceptible of influence ! They have come to stay ever so 
long. They must insist on having supper with her — 
on spending the lengthiest and gayest of evenings. At 
their head was a girlish Madame d'Egmont — twenty 
years old at the most — who was quite irresistible, said 
Madame, when she looked up into one's face and talked, 
and who had "a grace and vivacity which neither 
sculpture nor painting shall pourtray." The description 
of her was so charming that Stanislas wanted her por- 
trait. She died, poor soul! in the sequel, still only a 
girl, and childless. On that evening death and disaster 
must have seemed far off enough. For Madame, though 
she was old and had suffered, had the supreme unself- 
ishness which communicates all its joys, and keeps its 
sorrows to itself. She laughed with her visitors, and 
scolded them tenderly after her fashion. " I scold them 
on the way they waste their youth," she said, " and preach 
to them that they may have an old age as bright and 
healthy as mine," and gave them, perhaps, that senten- 



MADAME GEOFFRIN 61 

tious little maxim, at which they all laughed delightfully 
at the moment, and thought over a little afterwards: 
" There are three things that the women of Paris throw 
out of the window — their time, their health, and their 
money." 

Is it not a pretty, natural little scene in the coarse, 
clever, artificial drama of this French eighteenth cen- 
tury? Madame Geoffrin was in her own person a 
witness to the quiet good that always lives on through 
the worst periods of noisy vice. She should be remem- 
bered for ever, if only as the type and voice of those 
silent multitudes who follow duty in the basest age, and 
in the teeth of a low public opinion struggle towards 
ideals not mean. 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 

In the group of brilliant women who "ruled Paris 
through their Salons," there was not one so character- 
istic of the worst side of that great eighteenth century 
as Madame d'Epinay. In her one sees its sublime self- 
deceit, after which all sin is easy. She had in full 
measure its charm, its cleverness, and its folly ; its fine 
talk and its mean practice; its feeling for beauty and 
truth, and its " windy sentimentalism," which led away 
from both. From her rooms came a hot air feverish 
with debate. Here it was always candle-light, with no 
cold clear morning to search the shams. Here every 
woman was in love with the wrong man, and every man 
in love with the wrong woman. The worst crime was 
forgivable if the sinner sinned wittily. And out of her 
portrait the presiding genius of this little world looks 
down the century with the falsest smiling face that 
ever woman had. For Madame d'Epinay was light to 
her soul. 

As she was also the friend of the great men of 
a famous age, listened to Voltaire, Grimm, Galiani, 
Diderot, Duclos, Holbach, Rousseau, and wrote memoirs 
to record what she had heard, she has no slight claim 
on remembrance. 




( fla 



cuz/rrte ^y f y// / /ts/ // . 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 63 

Louise Florence Petronville d'Esclavelles was born in 
1726. Her father was governor of Valenciennes, and 
lived there with his wife and child until his death. 
Then Madame brought up the little Louise to Paris 
for an education ; gave her M. d'Affry as a tutor (Louise 
attached herself to him with a charming childish 
affection), and returned herself to Valenciennes, leaving 
the little daughter to be brought up, with a large 
party of cousins, by her Aunt and Uncle Bellegarde. 

Judiciousness does not seem to have been the dis- 
tinguishing feature of Louise's early training. Madame 
d'Esclavelles was a severe, righteous woman — hard and 
fast rules and sharp punishments. She inspired in the 
little girl the fear which is but too prone to protect 
itself by white lies. When Louise had been long a 
married woman, she was still in no small awe of her 
mother, nay, had, up to the time of Madame's death — 
though she was a tender daughter and a devoted — the 
shrinking of the weak nature before the strong. 

Uncle Bellegarde seems to have been particularly 
kind, and Aunt Bellegarde distinctly disagreeable. 
Louise formed devoted youthful friendships with her 
girl cousins, and wrote affectionate careful letters (care- 
ful, remembering he was her dear tutor, and would not 
expect faults of style and expression) to M. d'Affry. 
Then she went for a little while to a convent. When 
she came out of it she was no longer a child, but a 
charming girl, not pretty (but then a Frenchwoman 
does not need beauty to make her attractive), with 



64 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

great dark eyes in a very pale, thin, animated, and 
expressive face. As there was a boy cousin a good deal 
at home, Louise, of course, immediately fell in love with 
him. She confided her passion to his married sisters, 
who, to do them justice, warned her quite openly of 
their brother's real character — of his " rare facility " for 
lying, his expensive, gay tastes, and notoriety for worse 
wickedness. Louise was not in the least disillusioned, 
of course. She had the most obstinate youthful in- 
fatuation. To be sure this delightful M. de la Live did 
not at all care for her at present. But he would— he 
must. M. de la Live — he presently changed his name 
to d'Epinay — was, in point of fact, not long proof against 
the very evident admiration of his charming little cousin, 
and having just, and most conveniently, been made 
fermier general, married her at St. Koch. Louise was 
nineteen. 

The young pair continued, after the French fashion, 
to live with M. de Bellegarde. Madame Bellegarde was 
now dead, so Madame d'Esclavelles had taken her place 
in the house. The d'Epinays began their married life 
with that abandon to passion which goes before dis- 
enchantment more certainly than pride before a fall. 
On the very first day they had the most charming 
coquettish quarrel about rouge. Was Louise to put it 
on, like other women of her time, or not ? Mamma said 
no. M. d'Epinay, yes. Between these two s 
minded people Louise really could not tell in the 
how to act. She gives the most vivacious little ac. < 



i 



MADAME D'EPINAY 65 

of the scene herself. She was in the heyday of a very 
brief delight — young, attractive, beloved. One can read 
between the lines the pleasure of her gay little heart, 
and cannot but feel sad for the happiness that had no 
stamina to keep it alive. 

The pair after a time, and not a little in opposition 
to the wishes of Madame d'Esclavelles, very naturally 
liked to go out and enjoy themselves. M. d'Epinay 
seems to have taken possession of Louise's character, 
as mamma took possession of it in her childhood. She 
was, just now at least, more afraid of him than of her 
mother, and, besides, wanted to go to those balls and 
parties where her brightness and vivacity made her 
more admired than all the regular, dull beauty in Paris. 
So they ignored mamma's strictness, and presently, and 
in the very greatest excitement, gave a ball themselves. 

They had been married about a year when Louise 
discovered, what the warnings of her sisters-in-law had 
failed to make her realise, the true nature of the man 
she had married. It is difficult to fancy a more con- 
temptible person than this gay, easy, pleasant, extra- 
vagant, self-indulgent, light-hearted fermier general. 
M. d'Epinay was never troubled all his life long by a 
scruple. He had not the faintest sense of responsi- 
bility. He was more cheerfully and good-naturedly 
* icked than any other Frenchman in history. He did 

she >ed plan to avoid right and practise wrong. He 

chax saw no difference between them. 

doefc )uise was a very young wife, and had been, poor 
' E 



66 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

soul, happy but such a very short time, the shrieks and 
faintings with which she first learnt of her husband's 
faithlessness may be well forgiven her. M. Jully, her 
brother-in-law, comforted her by saying, "What does 
it signify ? He won't love you any less in his heart." 
M. d'Epinay himself also thought it really did not 
matter. Louise always ended by sharing the opinion 
of the people she was with. So she put on a very 
pretty frock and a little colour on to her pale cheeks, 
felt quite bright again, and they all went to a delightful 
ball at the opera. 

She had a better consolation when in the September 
of 1746 her little son was born to her. There was a 
great deal of natural affection in this not very profound 
little heart, it seems. Madame was delightfully fond 
and proud of the baby, and wanted very much to keep 
him with her instead of putting him out to be nursed, 
after the unnatural fashion of the time. " Que voila 
une de ces folles idees ! " wrote M. d'Epinay, who was 
away making his duty tour en province. So Louise 
yielded, as she always yielded. It was while Monsieur 
was on this tour, and his wife was still calling him her 
" angel," and finding his absence " insupportable," that 
she discovered by chance one day at a Paris jeweller's 
that the " angel " had been giving his portrait mounted 
in pearls to Some Other Person. When she taxed him 
with this faithlessness when he came home, he laughed 
and stopped her mouth with a^kiss. " What difference 
does it make to you ? " he said, just as M. Jully had 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 67 

said. "However fond I am of others, I shall always 
be fondest of you." It was a fine consolation. There 
is not a little significance in the fact that as M. 
d'Epinay, gay, self-pleased, and debonnaire, went out of 
the room laughing, M. de Francueil, who was to play 
so fatal a part in the wife's life, entered it. 

The whole scene is quite characteristic of that " Age 
of Persiflage" which was even now rushing, drunk 
with wit and pleasure, blinded by its own lightness, its 
specious talking and evil-doing, upon the naked swords 
of the Terror. 

Louise, since that gay, faithless husband left her so 
much, began in a sort of self-defence to form friend- 
ships on her own account. There was Madame d'Arty, 
who had no reputation to speak of, and who one night 
took Louise (Louise wanting to go, and half afraid, and 
planning feeble little excuses for her naughtiness in her 
own mind all the time) to a gay surreptitious supper 
with the inspector of the opera. M. d'Epinay was 
dreadfully angry when he found out about the ad- 
venture. It was not wicked. . It was worse. It was 
inconvenable. Of what could Madame d'Arty be 
thinking ? It was Monsieur himself who introduced 
his wife to the friendship of the notorious Mademoiselle 
d'Ette, who was so shameless, so clever, and so aban- 
doned — with her exquisite complexion of milk and 
roses, and her girlish airs of timidity — that of all the 
base actions of the fermier gtnSral's life this introduc- 
tion was perhaps the basest. 



68 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Mademoiselle took possession of the little Madame 
immediately. She established herself chez Epinay. 
Monsieur was away. She sat at work with Louise — 
those endless tapestries and embroideries which were 
the fashion of the day — looked up from the frame, 
perhaps, with her beautiful false eyes, to see how much 
she might dare to say to this weaker woman, for how 
strong a poison the feeble soul was fit. Louise adored 
her, and confided in her. (Louise went on adoring 
and confiding in the latest comer nearly all her life.) 
Mademoiselle told her own shameful history, adding 
complacently, as comment, "In all that youth and 
lightness made me do, there is nothing, thank God, for 
which I need blush." 

When M. de Francueil called and bent over Louise's 
little hand, and brought to bear upon her very sus- 
ceptible heart the charms of his cultivated intelli- 
gence and of his handsome face, the little devil of the 
embroidery frame (there is no other word that quite 
fits Mademoiselle d'Ette) saw the means to get Madame 
into her power, and used them. The next day, perhaps, 
she told Louise the further true story of M. d'Epinay's 
infidelities. The wife repudiated the insinuations — 
listened, doubted, believed. There seems no very 
specific reason why Mademoiselle should have wished 
to ruin her friend. That Madame dared to be still 
innocent while Mademoiselle was corrupt to the core, 
may have been reason enough. 

In June 1747 Louise had a little daughter. By the 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 69 

time she returned to Paris and her husband joined her 
again, the influence of the friend he had given her had 
sunk deep into her soul. She complained plaintively 
of the dreadful ennui of having to feign pleasure at the 
reunion, when she could not feel it. Their marriage 
was stripped of the last rag of illusion. From hence- 
forward all intimacy between husband and wife was at 
an end. 

One can well imagine that Louise's frame of mind 
when she went to her husband's place, La Chevrette, 
with her children, her father-in-law and his household, 
was not a little dangerous. She was young, deceived, 
susceptible. She was under the influence of a bad 
woman. She was deplorably weak. When M. de 
Bellegarde invited Francueil to stay there with them, it 
must have seemed like a decree of destiny. But then 
as ever, " character is destiny," one must remember. 

Francueil was one of the most brilliant figures of the 
eighteenth century. He was a musician and an actor of 
no mean order, and had the finest literary taste and 
judgment. He was receiver-general, had a large fortune, 
delightful manners, an agreeable person, and a complete 
incapacity for any kind of fidelity. He had at this time 
a wife in the background, but she does not seem to have 
counted, and was, in fact, dismissed, as it were, from 
consideration by a man who was once Francueil's secre- 
tary, and was to be the greatest man of his age, in the 
words bien laide, bien douce. 

A very vivid imagination is not needed to picture the 



70 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

life at La Chevrette. Francueil taught Madame com- 
position and harmony. The bright pupil looked up into 
the tutor's handsome face and learnt there what is not 
written in text-books. A woman can find, if she likes, 
a personal application in algebra or in Greek roots. 
One may be sure Louise was not long in discovering 
a very human side to the lessons of this brilliant pre- 
ceptor. She told him presently — with bewitching 
tears, no doubt — the history of her husband's false- 
ness. It is hard to say whether she was more charm- 
ing when she was softly gay or softly sad. The pair 
were soon vowing an eternal "pure" and " disinterested 
friendship." They took long walks, when they dis- 
cussed the problems of the heart and soul — the heart 
and soul meaning, of course, those particular organs 
which belonged to Madame d'fipinay and M. de Fran- 
cueil. When they came home after these rambles, 
half guilty, half happy, there was Mademoiselle d'Ette 
with her evil smile, knowing everything, and working 
to the vile end quietly in the background, and M. 
de Bellegarde good-humoured and unconscious. 

Everything was against them — the dangerous philo- 
sophies both had imbibed, the low public opinion of 
their age, base friends, bad examples, their own 
characters. Louise denied herself to the lover for a 
day or two, wept, fainted, and wrote, " Go, go ; I will 
never forgive you" — and forgave. It is a very old, 
shameful story, with the same end always. 

There is, perhaps, no worse testimony against Madame 



MADAME D'^PINAY 71 

d'Epinay than the account she herself gives of this 
episode in her Memoirs. Her pretty self-complacency 
is just ruffled. It is as if she would say, "A little 
imprudent, a little unwise, but so naive, so impulsive, 
so warm-hearted!" When M. de Francueil brought 
down a little troupe of actors to La Chevrette, the 
charming novelty dismissed from this light soul the 
last faint shadow of uneasiness which might have 
remained to trouble its peace. Louise was quickly 
discovered to be the most piquante of amateur 
actresses, with, it is said, something in her voice, 
eyes, smile that moved the heart. Madame de 
Maupeou, her sister-in-law, was also delightfully 
piquante in the part of a servant, Lisette — so 
piquante, in fact, that M. de Maupeou forbade her 
to act any more. (The attitude of most of these 
wives towards their husbands was pretty well de- 
scribed by Francueil when he wrote to Louise, 
"C'est que votre mari est un monstre et vous une 
adorable creature.") The young people rehearsed 
and coquetted and amused themselves very well 
indeed. M. de Bellegarde and Madame d'Esclavelles 
permitted the frivolity in the hope that it might 
distract Louise from the melancholy thoughts of her 
husband's infidelity. 

She was sufficiently distracted, it seems. The play 
was a comedy entitled U Engagement Umdraire, and 
one night Francueil presented to the troupe the 
author, one Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "as poor as Job 



72 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

and with wit and vanity enough for four." Rousseau 
was at this time thirty-seven years old — coward, liar, 
sensualist, genius. It was only the genius which 
Madame d'£pinay and her friends regarded. That 
covered all sins. The charming comediennes flattered 
him, no doubt, to the top of his bent, and he answered 
them, after his kind, with brutality and insult, so that 
they must needs worship the more. Through his 
comedy ran all the time that other comedy of the loves 
of Francueil and Louise, and in the background, watch- 
ing always, Mademoiselle d'Ette wrote her view of 
the proceedings to her Chevalier Vallory. 

Among the easy lies which stole into these Memoirs 
of Madame d'£pinay there were, most naturally, also 
many suppressions of fact. In 1750 was born her 
daughter, Pauline, whom Madame, with but too good 
reasons, tried to confuse with the child born in 1747. 
But if it is the consequences of evil-doing which ruin 
reputation, it is the evil itself which ruins the soul. 
It seems to matter very little whether in such a case 
Madame spoke the truth or not. The sin was 
sinned. 

It was in this same year that Louise was intro- 
duced to the society of Mademoiselle Quinault. The 
Quinault was a wit, entirely without a moral sense, 
and with a taste for clever company and doubtful 
jokes. Francueil called her "la Ninon du siecle." 
At her house, twice a week, met a little party as 
clever as any in Paris. Here one night was M. 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 73 

Duclos, who was to be Secretary of trie Academy and 
historiographer of France, and who was already the 
man who could, or at any rate did, say anything 
— trenchant, despotic, domineering. Here was the 
Marquis de Saint-Lambert, soldier, poet, philosopher, 
cultivated man of the world, and lover of that Madame 
d'Houdetot, Louise's sister-in-law, who was afterwards 
the original of Rousseau's " Julie " in Heloise. Louise 
herself brought to the party ("we were only five") 
youth, charm, sympathy; that engaging weakness 
which always made her agree with the last speaker, 
and that accommodating conscience which was hurt 
by no vileness prettily expressed. The Quinault's 
little niece was sent away at the dessert. One 
wanted to say everything that came into one's head. 
The hostess was not going to have any restriction on 
her coarse pleasantries. When the conversation turned 
on the decency of going without clothes, Louise weakly 
thought for a minute the subject a little unsuit- 
able — "but then, M. de Saint-Lambert puts into it 
reflections so grave, so exalted ! " The remark is 
inimitably characteristic of the woman. A new poem 
by Voltaire was introduced presently — on whose merits 
the little gathering differed charmingly — and another 
evening, when Rousseau was of the company, they 
discussed atheism. They touched all subjects with 
a cleverness not a little seductive and extraordinary, 
and expressed their theories with such a brilliancy 
that there is no wonder that the theorists as well 



74 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

as their listeners were too dazzled to see the truth. 
It was only Rousseau (though he was a beast, he 
had something of the freedom and naturalness of a 
beast of the field) who brought into this world of 
shams and artifices that enthusiastic earnestness 
which characterised all his emotions while they 
lasted. 

" As for me, sir," said he, " I believe in God." And 
when Saint-Lambert spoke of such a faith as the 
"origin of all the follies," "Messieurs," said Rousseau, 
" if you say another word I go." And later, " I cannot 
bear this rage for destruction. . . . The idea of a 
God is necessary to happiness." 

Louise was on the side of faith, too. But "we 
only believe as deep as we live" after all. She had 
a charming fit of repentance presently for her poor 
light little life : confessed all the " chagrins que 
m'avait donne mon mari" to the Abbe Martin; for 
a few days wanted dreadfully to be a Carmelite, and 
was a little deterred from the plan by the Abbe 
telling her that God was not to be made a pis 
alter, and a great deal deterred by the fact that the 
world (where, said M. Martin, lay her duty) was 
really more attractive after all. 

By this time M. d'fipinay's extravagances had 
necessitated a separation de biens between husband 
and wife. Madame now began to receive her friends 
regularly twice a week for music, and to read or 
play comedies. Duclos came to stay at La Chevrette, 



MADAME D'^PINAY 75 

half fell in love with Louise, and got her quite into 
his coarse power by making her tell him the story 
of her love for Francueil. Mademoiselle d'Ette, who 
was still chez fipinay, hated Duclos, and fought him, 
as it were, for the mastery over the little Madame. 
Louise was the shuttlecock between two players. 
If she had been a good woman, her weakness would 
have ruined her past hope. As it was 

Francueil grew cold presently, which, with his 
temperament, might very well have been expected. 
Louise wept over his coldness to Mademoiselle d'Ette, 
looked up through tears and saw — or thought she 
saw — that Mademoiselle herself had a passion for 
Francueil. Louise was soon writing (very likely not 
at all unjustly) of that dearest confidante and bosom 
friend : " Who knows if she is not now my hus- 
band's spy ? . . . I have so many reasons to suspect 
her." 

At a supper party at Madame Jully's, Francueil, 
who was intoxicated, dropped a note Louise had 
given him in front of M. d'fipinay. The hostess, 
who had had on her own account a pretty little 
experience in intrigue, picked up the note and saved 
the situation. It was thought that M. d'fipinay had 
incited Francueil to drink, in order that he might 
make admissions derogatory to Louise. It may have 
been true, perhaps. In this society nothing was too 
vile to be possible. Madame's intimates were now 
Eousseau, Gauffecourt, Duclos, Madame de Jully, 



76 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Chevalier Vallory, and Mademoiselle d'Ette. In 
that list there was no person clean, honourable, or 
virtuous. It was not until Rousseau introduced 
Grimm to the party (though even Grimm, Heaven 
knows, did not reach an over-exalted standard of 
moral perfection) that one could breathe at all in 
that tainted air. 

Grimm was at this time still a young man. He 
was the friend of Holbach and Diderot, as well as 
of Rousseau. He was of German extraction, with 
some of the solidity of the Teutonic character com- 
bined with the taste and polish of the Frenchman. 
He was already an Jiabitui of the salons of Madame 
Geoffrin and the Duke of Orleans. He was the 
favourite of Catharine of Russia, and had begun his 
Correspondance Litttraire. In character he seems 
to have been strong, melancholy, and reserved — the 
man who was, as it were, always superior to the 
situation, hard and excellent in counsel, fixed in 
idea, cool and wise in judgment, firm, clear-seeing, 
and ambitious. 

Since Louise had now broken with her lover, as 
her lover, it was inevitable that she should fall 
under a new command. 

It would seem to be in the nature of the noblest 
women, as the weakest, never to know rest or 
happiness until they have met their master. Only 
in the one case it is too hard to find him, and in 
the other too eas}^. One may be thankful that it 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 77 

was Grimm who now dominated this little Madame, 
instead of another d'fipinay or a Francueil. 

She began by asking him to her concerts. He 
had a passionate love of music, as well as that 
cultivated taste for art, science, and literature. One 
night he heard her name insulted, fought a duel 
for its honour (alas ! poor soiled little name), was 
wounded, and had earned her gratitude for ever. 
Duclos, who tyrannised over her, hated Grimm, as 
may be imagined. Francueil, who still visited at 
La Chevrette, may have been in his heart not too 
much his friend. " But," says Madame easily, " we 
led a very charming life." M. de Francueil came as 
often as M. Grimm. "lis se partageaient meme de 
fort bon accord les soins qu'ils voulaient bien se 
donner pour l'instruction de mes enfants." There 
is no sentence in history, perhaps, which reveals so 
total a depravity of all moral sense as this one. It 
was Grimm, but not Louise, who did at last object 
to the situation, and, having forced her to quarrel 
with Duclos, suggested that Francueil should no 
longer be a guest at her house. 

With her connection with Grimm (it lasted till 
her death) began the least unworthy part of her 
life. If he loved her, he loved his career and am- 
bition better. But he ruled her. And on her side 
she had that wholesome fear of him which often keeps 
a fickle nature constant. 

It was in 1756 that Madame d'fipinay offered 



78 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Rousseau the famous " Hermitage," the little house 
situated near La Chevrette, on the borders of the 
forest of Montmorency and belonging to M. d'fipinay. 
Rousseau responded to the offer after his manner: 
" Do you want to make me a valet, a dependant, 
with your gift ? " said he — and took it. 

Madame had now the satisfaction of seeing every day 
the greatest scoundrel and genius of the time. Here 
was the man at once mean and great, lower than the 
beasts in his instincts, and with aspirations reaching to 
the gods. Here he was, very vile, but not wholly vile ; 
mixed in the basest intrigues, vain, mad, morbid, lying, 
treacherous, and yet with ideals not all ignoble, and a 
rugged earnestness not to be denied. 

Madame's pleasure at being so nearly in touch with a 
celebrity could never have been quite unalloyed. The 
celebrity was from the first consistently rude and un- 
grateful, always taking offence where no offence was 
meant, piqued, childish, ridiculous, and obstinately 
seeing the world en noir. To La Chevrette came 
constantly Desmahis, Saint-Lambert, Gauffecourt, M. 
Jully. Louise, gaily playful, called them mes ours, 
and Grimm her " Tyran Le Blanc." " Tyran Le Blanc " 
was called away presently by his duties; and Louise, 
on some ill-fated day, introduced that charming 
sister-in-law of hers, Madame d'Houdetot, at the 
Hermitage. 

Hitherto the relationship between the Hermit and 
Madame d'Epinay had been a kind of coquettish 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 79 

friendship. If Rousseau was a little bit in love with 
Madame (and he always fell in love — save the mark ! 
— with any woman with whom he was brought much 
in contact), Louise., for all her " Tyran Le Blanc," was 
not the woman to object to the admiration. It seems 
pretty certain that she felt a little betrayed when Jean- 
Jacques found in the sister-in-law the Julie of his 
Nouvelle Helo'ise in the flesh, and worshipped at the 
shrine of a woman who was neither modish nor beau- 
tiful, and was already provided (though, to be sure, 
that did not count much in these times) with both hus- 
band and lover. Louise was thrown back upon herself. 
There was a coldness. Then she sent Rousseau some 
flannel for a waistcoat — to restore warmth, one may 
suppose. There was a deeper coldness. Then an angry 
flame about a letter. If there is anything duller than 
details of old intrigues, it is the details of old quarrels. 
It may be safely assumed that Rousseau was in the 
wrong (he had a talent for being in that position), and 
that Louise was inconsequent and imprudent as usual. 
One may well pity her. Her tyrant had joined the 
army at the bidding of the Duke of Orleans. She wrote 
to him that when he was with her he inspired her with 
that feeling of security which a child has resting on its 
mother's breast. There were a thousand dangers and 
difficulties about her loneliness. Her father-in-law, who 
cared for her, was dead. She had certainly no wisdom 
or judgment of her own to rely on. She impetuously 
confided in everybody, as she had always done, and her 



80 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

confidences were very naturally betrayed. She was 
supposed to have informed the Marquis de Saint- 
Lambert of Rousseau's passion for his mistress. Per- 
haps she did; she denied the insinuation so warmly. 
Everybody seems to have got mixed up in the quarrel, 
and to have acted after their own natures, which were 
bad. Its first vehemence died out a little. But Rous- 
seau, who still kept her gift — the Hermitage — defamed 
the giver with a matchless foulness in his " Confessions." 
From that effect of her folly, even Grimm (who from 
his letters would seem to have been the only person 
who brought any reason and common-sense into the 
dispute) could not save her. All the time Madame had 
been writing him plaintive little lying letters (giving her 
own convenient, plausible views of the situation and 
her conduct), which deceived herself, but not her lover 
or the world. 

In 1757 she went to Geneva, partly on account of 
money troubles, and partly to consult the famous Dr. 
Tronchin. She left Grimm behind her, at war with 
Rousseau, and revising the first volumes of the famous 
Encyclopaedia with Diderot. With her went her son 
and Linant, his tutor. (Louise was always a good 
mother according to her lights, and has been aptly 
described as one of those women "who write moral 
treatises on education in the brief leisure left them by 
their lovers.") She established herself then at Geneva 
under Tronchin, and lived there a life very modest and 
simple. She had her mornings to herself, dined en 



MADAME D'^PINAY 81 

famille, and after dinner received till seven or eight. 
She walked a good deal in the public gardens. She had 
always been fond of walking, and Tronchin, who was 
greatly in advance of his age in his views upon health, 
recommended the exercise to his lazy and ladylike 
patients. The little society of Geneva was very pleasant 
and honest, Madame found. One played cards, did 
needlework, had a little music, took tea after the 
English fashion, and visited one's friends in the after- 
noons. Wasn't this better than La Chevrette and 
Mademoiselle d'Ette (Madame had completely broken 
with the d'Ette by now), and the uneasy years of in- 
trigue and passion that had made up her youth ? 

When Grimm came to Geneva for an eight months' 
stay, during which he and Louise worked together at 
the Correspondance Litteraire, she was perhaps as 
happy as she had ever been in her life. She presently 
made the acquaintance of Voltaire, who called her his 
Beautiful Philosopher, and played with her (all men 
regarded Louise as a clever little toy, it seems) when she 
became a constant visitor at Les Delices, while she on 
her side spoke of that "withered Pontiff of Encyclo- 
psedism " as more amiable, more gay, and more extra- 
vagant than at fifteen. 

When she returned to Paris, after an absence of two 
years, Kousseau had left the Hermitage. Grimm had 
been nominated envoy at Frankfort, and she found a 
resource from boredom and solitude in the friendship 
of Diderot and the Salon of Baron Holbach, and that 

F 



82 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Correspondance LitUraire, which is Grimm's true 
title to glory, and which had as its aim to render 
foreign princes an account of the art, science, literature, 
wit, and mental progress of Paris. 

Madame d'fipinay was now past youth. Her mother 
was dead. Her daughter, Pauline, was married. M. 
d'Epinay, of whom Diderot said that he ran through 
two millions of money without saying a kind word or 
doing a good action to anybody, was completely bank- 
rupt. Madame took a very small house, established her 
Salon, and reconquered that world which, through bad 
health, damaged reputation, and long absence, she had 
lost. She was now perhaps, both morally and mentally, 
at her best. The quick temptations of youth had left 
her. And this was the woman, alas ! who was only good 
when there was no incitement to be bad. It must be 
said of her that she had shown not a little pluck and 
spirit in the face of poverty and difficulties. Her fickle- 
ness had Grimm's strength to support it. Her sympathy 
with literature made an honest interest for her. If she 
was still something of the gay little liar, bright, volatile, 
intriguing, who began the world as Louise d'Esclavelles, 
that is because life, though it develops character, seldom 
alters it. 

The Salon of Madame d'Epinay had that character- 
istic common to nearly all the Salons — its presiding 
genius was neither young, beautiful, wealthy, nor even 
well educated. 

A woman, in fact, always influences not by how 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 83 

much she knows, but by how much she feels. In 
the gatherings of this little Louise, at any rate, the 
gravest subjects were discussed and threshed out. 
After the ivresse and folly of the Regency, gravity 
had suddenly become the mode. The most frivolous 
women were profoundly absorbed in political economy 
and philanthropy. Philosophic ideas were daily gain- 
ing ground. One day one was evolving a new religion 
— some fine religion of Humanity, which worked out 
beautifully in talk or on paper, and in practice led 
to Candeille, Goddess of Reason. To this Salon came 
almost the whole diplomatic corps. Baron Gleichen, 
Lord Stormont (the Ambassador of Great Britain), 
Caraccioli, Diderot, Galiani, and the ill-fated Marquis 
de Mora, were here almost every night. Louise listened 
equally / charmingly to them all. Was she a humbug? 
Hardly. She had only that most dangerous gift — 
the power of seeing things exactly as the last speaker 
sees them. When this man was talking philosophy 
to her she was an impassioned philosopher. With a 
theologian she had a culte for religions. To be sym- 
pathetic it is not necessary to know much of a man's 
work and aims, but essential to catch his enthusiasm 
for them, to respond to fervour with fervour, and to 
realise that what one's dearest hope is to oneself this 
man's career or philosophy or ambition is to him. 

If even Madame d'Epinay had this gift in a less 
degree than some of her rival Salonieres, that she 
had it in a very marked degree is not to be doubted. 



84 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

In the early days of 1775 appeared in print her 
Conversations oVEmilie, which were, in fact, literal 
reproductions of conversations she had had with a 
certain dear little granddaughter, her daughter's child. 
The book, though it is really a book of education, is 
only another proof that nature and naturalness are 
always delightful. Little Eruilie's replies have the 
innocent naivete of childhood, and all the freshness 
of truth. Madame d'Epinay's talent as a writer is 
indeed like the literary talent of nearly all women, and 
lies in this work, as in her Memoirs, in reproduction 
and observation, and not in invention. jSmilie was 
smiled on by Voltaire in his old age at Ferney, and 
by that cleverest of women, the Empress Catharine 
of Russia. Diderot, Grimm, Gleichen, and Galiani 
praised its gaiety and originality, and in 1778 it went, 
to every one's satisfaction, into a new edition. 

Before this time Madame d'Epinay's health, never 
robust, had begun to cause her friends great anxiety. 
She would seem, like many delicate people, to have 
always borne her physical sufferings very pluckily. 
The little Emilie was with her a great deal. Grirnm, 
never impassioned, was yet always faithful. He had 
an extraordinary attachment for the grandchild, which 
perhaps brought him the more often to see Louise, 
In 1777 she heard of Francueil's marriage to a 
daughter of Marshal Saxe. (Of this marriage was 
born a son, Maurice Dupin, who became the father 
of Madame George Sand.) In 1778 Louise saw 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 85 

in Paris Voltaire, now near his death. Rousseau 
{whose "Confessions" had had so fatal an effect upon 
her good name) did not long survive him. It was 
Madame's part, though she herself was not an old 
woman, to watch the going of almost all the acquaint- 
ances of her youth. Her situation was very lonely. Her 
husband's death did not make it any lonelier perhaps. 
Her son was wild — after such an upbringing and amid 
such examples how should he not have been? Her 
daughter had her own life to lead. What must have 
been the feelings of the woman with death in the 
near future and that wasted existence to look back 
at in the past? 

Was it repentance, agony, remorse, terror, that she 
suffered in those lonely hours of sickness and solitude ? 
It would not seem to have been so. After all "one 
can be but what one is." 

The dying woman faced the Great Mystery with at 
least something of that UgereU with which the coquette 
of La Chevrette had faced life. A sinner ? Well, per- 
haps. But not half such a great sinner as most of 
one's acquaintance ! If one lives self-deceived, one 
may well die so. 

Madame was removed presently to a little house 
at Chaillot, and there from her sick-bed composed 
and sent to Grimm, with a lock of her hair, the verses 
which begin : — 

" Les voila, ces cheveux que le temps a blanchis : 
D'une longue union ils sont pour nous le gage." 



86 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

She had friends and relatives about her to the end. 
Her last correspondence was with that chief of all the 
Encyclopaedists, d'Alembert. And then her " Conver- 
sations " attained the supreme honour of being crowned 
by the Academie Francaise. So that she died smiling 
as she had lived. 

Her Memoirs, which are chiefly known to English 
people through Sydney Smith's brilliant critique, owe 
their great claim to fame in the vivid pictures they 
give of Rousseau, Duclos, Voltaire, and many minor 
celebrities. They are written in a style very bright, 
easy, and vivacious. They record not a few inimitable 
conversations (as in the two scenes at Mademoiselle 
Quinault's), and here and there a memorable axiom. 
They present strikingly the life and manners of the 
day. Further than this they are worth little. 

These are the Memoirs of false names and suppres- 
sions. Madame invents a tutor to tell the story of 
the charming Emilie, and only tells the truth about 
her because she does not perceive how damning that 
truth is. When, indeed, the conduct of this heroine 
has been too obviously shameless even for her to 
think it virtuous, she appeals very prettily from the 
reader's judgment and moral sense to that much more 
gullible thing, his feelings. The whole book is full of 
very brightly written details of very dull intrigues ; of 
sordid details of bankruptcy and creditors ; of minute 
details of old quarrels; of loathsome details of sick- 



MADAME D'fiPINAY 87 

ness and sin. If one wants to keep intact a faith in 
noble aims, in self-devotion, and in that spirit which 
has made some put honour first and pleasure a great 
way after, one will not read Madame d'fipinay. But 
if one is a pessimist about human nature, and wants 
his pessimism confirmed, he can hardly do better than 
study this lively account of the littleness and mean- 
ness of great men and of a great age; while the 
historian will certainly find a niche in the temple of 
fame for the woman who depicts so vividly, because 
so unconsciously, the crying need in her class and 
time of that cleansing by fire, the French Kevolution. 



MADAME NECKER 

Character, like history, repeats itself. There is, in- 
deed, in every man, seen aright, an originality which 
makes the dullest human being supremely interesting : 
and in each life a drama never before played on any 
stage. But the type recurs. In Madame Necker, with 
her passionate heart, her cleverness without wisdom, 
her instincts in place of judgment, her talent for affec- 
tion, and for making herself and others wretched by 
that affection, every one will recognise some acquaint- 
ance of his own. Perhaps he will be thus the more 
able to feel for her that sympathy without which there 
can be no real understanding. 

Suzanne Curchod was the very bright little daughter 
of a certain Louis, Evangelical minister at Crassier, in 
Vaud. Madame Curchod was French, very pretty, 
very firm, very religious. There was by no means too 
much money in the little household. But when the 
baby girl was born in 1737, she completed a very real, 
pious, and modest happiness. 

Her father was so proud and fond of her that he 
undertook her tuition himself. It was such a clever 
little creature from the first, that he felt justified in 
giving it a boy's education. Suzanne looked up into 



MADAME NECKER 89 

his face and learned Latin and geometry, presently 
physics and science, and possibly Greek. From what 
one knows of the famous Madame Necker, one must 
.suppose that the little girl's intellect was exclusively 
feminine, which is to say that she had a very fine in- 
tuition, rather than solid reasoning powers, the impulsive 
cleverness that is brilliant but hardly sound, and the 
tendency to mistake feeling for logic which marked 
Mother Eve, and marks her daughters for ever. 

But Suzanne had not only an aptitude for head work. 
She could play on the violin and the harpsichord. She 
knew something about an unlikely instrument called 
the tympanum. She painted delightfully. When one 
adds that she was charmingly vivacious, with very blue 
eyes, very fair hair, the most exquisite girlish com- 
plexion, and all the gaiety, modesty, and freshness of 
early youth, it does not seem at all wonderful that her 
father always had a large and ever-ready supply of 
young ministers from Geneva or Lausanne to help him 
with his services on Sundays. When the day was over, 
and the time came for the divine to ride home on 
M. Curchod's old horse, it appears that he was not the 
only person who felt regret at the parting. It is hardly 
a stretch of the imagination to picture Suzanne going 
out to the gate, half gay, half sad, and wholly charming, 
on the pretence of giving a little sugar to the old 
horse, or instructions to the man of God on the route 
he should take. 

She confessed very naively that she liked best that 



90 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

praise — on her little efforts at literary composition — 
which came from the opposite sex. Compliments to 
one's beauty are not less acceptable than compliments 
to one's wit. Suzanne coquetted very prettily with a 
number of persons, and permitted a rather ponderous 
local genius, a certain Dariet Defoncene, to call her his 
" modern Sappho," and address her in very second-rate 
and highly inflammatory verses, signed " Melchizedek." 
When she came to Lausanne presently with her 
parents, she was the life and soul of all the dull Protes- 
tant parties in the place. She enjoyed herself so much 
that she must have given enjoyment to others. She was 
made president, presently, of a literary society, called 
the Academie des Eaux, to which the local young 
persons of talent belonged, and called themselves after 
the heroes and heroines of the plays and novels of the 
day. They wrote essays and verses, and criticised each 
other's compositions. They answered questions such as 
" Is love sweeter by reason of its mystery ? " " Can the 
same kind of friendship exist between a man and a 
woman, as between two men or two women ? " The 
Academie des Eaux was to them what papers and 
magazines are to the English youth of to-day. They 
set themselves to answer the same unanswerable or 
self-evident conundrums with the greatest seriousness 
and enjoyment. Not a little zest was lent to the enter- 
tainment at Lausanne by the fact that the members 
of the Academie were not exclusively of one sex, and 
sometimes found the solution of the problems by ex- 



MADAME NECKER 91 

perience. Most of the youth were, at any rate, more or 
less in love with Themire, or Suzanne, its head. And 
Theruire, who, with her impetuous, warm heart, couldn't 
help enjoying admiration, dispensed her favours among 
them with a beautiful impartiality. 

It was at the Academie des Eaux, most likely, that 
she first met the great Gibbon. The great Gibbon was 
nobody in particular, however, at present. He was 
only a fat English youth, who had turned Papist, and 
been sent to the house of the Calvinist minister* of Lau- 
sanne to be re-converted. He was now in character, as 
he was hereafter, a very cold and self-complacent pedant, 
extraordinarily vain and egotistical, with a sincere love 
of truth, and a memory and capacity for learning un- 
equalled even in the eighteenth century. If it was not 
his genius, which a brilliant girl like Suzanne might 
easily have discovered before a dull world suspected it, 
it is hard to say what attraction she could have found 
in him. He talked well, indeed. One may picture the 
local talent of the Academie listening to him — too polite 
to laugh at his awkward English fatness and affected 
manner — but only very dimly, or not at all, guessing 
the marvellous power, irony, accuracy, which that un- 
prepossessing exterior covered. And listening, too, with 
her lovely expressive face, and her ardent and sympa- 
thetic heart, President Themire Suzanne Curchod. 

When was it that Gibbon permitted himself to be 
boundlessly and extravagantly adored by her? That 
was always their attitude to each other. The " Decline 



92 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

and Fall " could never have been sincerely in love with 
anybody but himself. 

But for Suzanne, the ministers, and that absurd 
Dariet Defoncene, and the adoration of all the Aca- 
demie were so much less than nothing now. They 
were but the false lights before the dawn. This was 
morning, noon, sunshine. One lived, one worshipped. 
She flung her whole heart and soul into this passion. 
She had no prudence. She spoke her love, not ashamed. 
She was the devotee before a saint, and behold, the 
saint was but a stone effigy after all, whom the kisses 
of a thousand years would not warm into life. 

It is from the spirit of their letters one gathers the 
real state of things. Gibbon's father disapproved of his 
son's penchant And the lover — save the mark ! — who 
had condescended to find Suzanne learned as well as 
lovely, and to hope that he had made "some impres- 
sion upon a virtuous heart," yielded to the paternal 
authority as a good son should, and wrote to the girl, 
eating that heart out with shame and misery, that his 
cure was helped by hearing of her "tranquillity and 
cheerfulness." 

Tranquillity ! this woman never knew such a feeling 
all her life. She was not the stuff of which tranquil 
people are made. She certainly did not know it when 
in 1758 Gibbon went back to England, and left her for 
four years without a sign of his existence, beyond send- 
ing her, with a frigid dedicatory epistle, his Essai 
sur V Etude de la LitUrature. He had not been man 



MADAME NECKER 93 

enough to break off their engagement decidedly and for 
all. He left her to hope against hope that he would 
come back to her. Her pride and her self-contempt 
tortured her every hour. In four years one may well 
feel all " the pangs of despised love." 

In 1762 he at last wrote to break with her definitely. 
In 1763 he came back to Lausanne. His Memoirs 
relative to this time contain not a single allusion to 
her. A few days after his arrival she begged him to 
tell her plainly that he no longer cared for her. When 
her impetuous letter had been given back to her, she 
wrote on it in the depth of her humiliation : " A reflect- 
ing soul is punishment enough. Every thought draws 
blood." Finally she met him at Voltaire's, at Ferney. 
He was so cruel (" only to be kind," perhaps) that the 
next day she wrote him her last letter. She did not 
spare him. He did not deserve that he should be 
spared — though when an impulsive woman flings her- 
self upon a cold man's heart, he is to be a little pitied 
as well as she. She told him the truth. She told it 
him at the greatest length, and with every line burn- 
ing with indignation and wretchedness, and then 
thanked God that He had delivered her from "the 
greatest of misfortunes," a marriage with Gibbon, and 
ended by saying that he might one day regret the 
loss of the " too honest and too loving heart " he had 
despised. 

It would seem that this broken love-story affected 
Suzanne's whole character. When it began, she was 



94 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

a girl. It left *her a woman. It found her a very 
lively, pretty, vivacious coquette. It left her passion- 
ately sensitive, not a little morbid and despondent, too 
scrupulous in conscience, nervous, excitable, suspicious. 
For to be betrayed is not only the bitterest experience 
of human life; it is also the most far-reaching in its 
effects. For it too often destroys trust not only in the 
deceiver, but in all men. And to be without faith in 
human nature generally means to be also without faith 
in God. 

In the January of 1760 Suzanne's father died sud- 
denly, leaving his widow and daughter wretchedly 
poor. Suzanne fought poverty with not a little spirit, 
and began to give lessons. She was fighting, too, all 
the time that source of wretchedness in her own heart, 
her love for Gibbon. No one who has himself been 
through some such period of youthful bitterness will 
judge her harshly, because her trouble made her petu- 
lant, exacting, and difficult at home. That noblest 
fruit of sorrow — an infinite tenderness for the sorrows 
and failings of other people — is fruit seldom borne by a 
young tree. Suzanne could not yet believe that happi- 
ness is not a necessity of life, and was at this time, 
or said afterwards that she was, wicked and capricious 
towards her mother. When two years later that 
mother died, the daughter lamented her with a passion 
of grief not a little hysterical. 

She was now quite alone in the world. She was 
so young ! She had no money. She was so proud ! 



MADAME NECKER 95 

And she found one of the best friends of her whole life 
in a certain Pastor Moultou. Another pastor, Cayla, 
Moultou's father-in-law, offered her a home in his 
house. Then, as now, the need of it brought out kind- 
ness, and a world that has been called cruel vindicated 
itself by generous deeds. 

Suzanne did not lack lovers, one may be quite sure. 
She was so lonely and despairing, that she very nearly 
accepted an offer of marriage from a certain barrister — 
simply for a home and peace. 

It was at Moultou's house that she met a gay little 
widow, Madame de Vermenoux, who was under the 
famous Dr. Tronchin, and trying to console herself for 
ill-health with the admiring society of a number of 
male friends. She took an impetuous fancy to this 
very pretty Mademoiselle Curchod. Suzanne must 
come back and live with her in Paris ! Suzanne's 
pride was up in arms in a minute. It was Moultou 
who reasoned with her and made her accept so advan- 
tageous an offer. The woman who was hereafter to 
rule the most brilliant society in the capital entered 
it first as an obscure dependant, who had not enough 
money even to dress herself as fashionable Paris re- 
quired, and who represented herself as rich to the 
good-natured little widow for fear Madame should 
humiliate her by presents. 

To Madame de Vermenoux' s, as, it is said, one of the 
charming widow's admirers, came one day a certain 
M. Necker, Swiss, bourgeois, banker, very rich, very 



96 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

clever, rather ugly, and peculiarly absent-minded. 
Perhaps he was so absent-minded that it slipped his 
memory that his hostess was an aristocrat, and that 
though she might permit herself to flirt with a finan- 
cier, was not at all likely to marry him. Perhaps he 
was thinking exclusively of M. Necker. (" Malebranche 
saw all things in God," said Mirabeau, " and M. Necker 
sees all things in Necker.") When was it that the 
financial eye first rested with interest on Madame's 
guest ? Mademoiselle was still young, and if sorrow 
had robbed her of some of the soft and brilliant bloom 
which characterised the happy President Themire, it 
had lent her face feeling, depth, expression. Her own 
clever mind could but be attracted by the sagacity and 
intelligence of the banker's. His self-conceit — well, 
that was a quality to which her friendship with Gibbon 
should have accustomed her. That old rebuff of for- 
tune made her cautious here. Once hurt as she had 
been, one does not lightly put oneself in the way of 
being wounded again. Did he care for her ? He had 
not said so. He went away to Geneva, leaving her in 
suspense; came back to Paris, and, with his offer of 
marriage, the sunshine flooded her dull world once 
more. 

The pair kept their engagement secret from Madame 
de Vermenoux. One fine morning they slipped out 
quietly and were married. There seems not a little 
meanness in their conduct, after the kindnesses Suz- 
anne had received from Madame. But there were, 



MADAME NECKER 97 

doubtless reasons (though possibly not good reasons) 
for such reserve. 

They went to live in the Rue St. Michel le Comte, 
in the house belonging to the firm of Thelusson and 
Necker. They enjoyed, one may well hope, that honey- 
moon happiness of which description is a desecration. 
And presently Suzanne was writing very gaily to a 
friend, with M. Necker looking over her shoulder, 
" Picture to yourself the worst-witted man in the world, 
so completely persuaded of his own superiority that he 
does not see mine," &c, &c, &c. If one has never 
known the laughing tenderness of such a spring-time 
in one's own experience, everybody at least must have 
looked at it through other men's eyes. 

The change which Suzanne's marriage made in her 
worldly prospects was very great. Instead of Madame 
de Vermenoux's dependant, she was the mistress of a 
fine house and many servants. Her husband was very 
rich, and not a little influential. When he was made 
Minister for the Republic of Geneva, the position gave 
him access to the Court and to the society of such men 
as Maurepas. At home his wife was very loving and 
brilliant, with curious fits of depression as a kind of 
reaction after a great deal of liveliness, very conscien- 
tious and impetuously religious. One cannot think that 
she could ever have been an easy wife to manage. 
Her very devotion to her husband, ecstatic, absorbed, 
and without sense of the ridiculous, must have been 

difficult for a practical man to deal with. Yet not 

G 



98 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

the less this marriage is one of the very few marriages 
in history which seems even to the onlooker well 
assorted. M. Necker was a great financier rather than 
a great man. But besides an extraordinary sagacity, 
he had a sound common-sense which made a fine, 
firm background to Suzanne's emotions. She could 
not but respect one in whose life duty and the good 
of others were strong sentiments, even if there was 
some little truth in the mot of Madame de Marchais : 
" M. Necker loves virtue as a man loves his wife, and 
glory as he loves his mistress." 

On April 22, 1766, Corinne-Delphine-Anne-Germaine 
Necker made her entrance into the world. Madame 
de Vermenoux, forgiving much, was her godmother. 
Her father was infinitely proud of her. Suzanne re- 
solved, as soon as ever the little girl was old enough to 
learn anything, she would teach her herself. 

Before that time came, Madame Necker found herself 
the head of one of the most famous Salons in Paris. 

Marmontel says that she started it as a relaxation 
for her husband. This is very possible. It was not 
easy to start. Unlike the other Salons, it was at 
least partly coaxed into existence by the husband 
himself. " The fruit of the tree of knowledge " was 
then, as now, very often a particularly "aerial and 
unsatisfactory diet." It was becoming the fashion or 
the philosophers and the men of letters to seek 
pecuniary aid from financiers. And M. Necker was 
of them all the most generous. 



MADAME NECKER 99 

As for his wife, " Who is this upstart ? " said the 
other women at first. " A little Swiss Protestant from 
Crassier ? Somebody's poor companion, quite unneces- 
sarily good-looking ? The wife of a bourgeois ? Bah ! " 

It is not a little curious that the Saloniere who, in 
contradistinction to almost all her rivals, was at once 
young, beautiful, rich, and learned, should not only be 
the one who of them all found it the most difficult to 
begin her Salon, but who, when it was at the height 
of its fame, was not always kindly criticised even by 
its habitues. 

Diderot says he first came because she bothered him 
to do so. The Abbe Galiani was a constant attendant, 
chiefly because he could not hold his own in argument 
against the open atheism of such a Salon as Baron 
Holbach's, for instance, and complained a good deal — 
without meaning a compliment to her — of Madame 
Necker's " cold demeanour of decency." Grimm's cool 
head and heart (his heart, says somebody, was always 
in the right place — the market-place) could not believe 
in the sincerity of her warm religious convictions. 
Another friend murmured that she was without taste 
in dress, artificial in mind and face, and pedantic in 
language. It was said again that she never directed 
the conversation without visible effort, and suggested 
that her manner was too effusive, that that "fiery 
soul" expressed its convictions or prejudices too 
warmly both in looks and words, and that some Jof the 

passionate sensitiveness and nervousness which afflicted 

L.cVC. 



100 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

herself, afflicted her friends. It may be true as well 
that she was too keenly absorbed in the drama of her 
own life, and the far greater drama of her husband's, 
to be very interested in other people. As for her 
learning — it is only a supremely tactful and sympa- 
thetic woman who can hinder learnedness from being 
a social hindrance to her. Madame Necker was too 
impetuous for tact, as she was too concentrated for 
sympathy. 

But her Salon, not the less, attained a wide fame. 
The litterateurs and philosophers flocked to Lt on 
Fridays, in her new house the Hotel le Blanc, Bue 
Clery, and presently in the famous Bue Bergere. On 
Tuesdays her intimates dined with her at four o'clock. 
In summer she received, first at her house in the Bois 
de Boulogne, and then at the Chateau de St. Ouen, 
between Paris and St. Denis. " I go once a week to 
supper at St. Ouen," said Madame du Deffand. She 
spoke of her host as quite frank and natural, but a 
little bit ponderous in conversation, and very absent- 
minded. 

Suzanne had an impulsive welcome for all her guests; 
knew how to flatter their self-love a little, it is said, 
though this was less by design than because her 
impetuosity led her to say the right thing instead of 
the wrong. Some of her friends asked for her help 
and influence to elect them to the Academy. Some- 
times in the evening she had Mademoiselle Clairon, 
the famous actress, to amuse them. She relied much 



MADAME NECKER 101 

less than the other Salonieres on her own powers of 
entertaining. On a footstool at her mother's feet sat 
the little Germaine, very bright and very precocious. 
When the Maison Necker received at St. Ouen, its 
guests walked about under the trees on the terrace, 
and Monsieur sent them back presently to Paris in 
his own carriages. There was a famous dinner, de- 
scribed by Grimm, at which seventeen men of letters 
proposed to erect a statue to Voltaire by subscription, 
and the daughter of the good Calvinist Curchod 
objected, because Pigalle, the sculptor, would have 
the figure represented almost without any clothes 
at all. 

What has been called the "marsh-miasma of 
Salons" can hardly be said to have risen from this 
one. Its head, at least, was a passionately religious 
woman, a faithful wife, and a severely conscientious 
mother. If she permitted in her rooms a society by 
no means immaculate, that proves rather the low 
moral tone of her age than any laxity in her own 
virtue. It was the custom. Let any one try to alter 
the public opinion of his own time, and he will pardon 
Madame Necker that she could not change the public 
opinion of hers. 

Buffon, the naturalist, supremely pompous and self- 
complacent, and with, alas ! most of the typical vices 
of the French philosopher of the day, was one of her 
faithful adherents. She admired the heavy pedantry 
of his style, and modelled her own upon it. And in 



102 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Thomas's bombastical periods — Thomas being her 
devoted worshippei for twenty years — she saw only 
solemnity and magnificence. Literary taste was hardly 
Madame's forte. Here, as elsewhere, the strong biases 
of a warm heart led her astray. Perhaps it was such 
a bias that made her seek and keep Diderot, whom " it 
was impossible to respect or to help loving," and who, 
though " he talked as never man talked," was not the 
less "utterly unclean, scandalous, shameless." Kindly 
old Madame Geoffrin scolded Suzanne's guests — for 
their good. The Duchess de Lauzan was one of her 
attached friends. It was this duchess who, married 
at sixteen, and abandoned by her Due the next day, 
was to be hereafter of that noble army of martyrs 
who expiated others' sins under the guillotine, and 
who mounted the scaffold with "that air of sweetness 
and virgin modesty " which once captivated Rousseau. 
Besides these were Suard, the censor of the Academie, 
Morellet, Raynal, Arnauld, Saint-Lambert, Marmontel, 
and many others. It was Suzanne's ambition which 
loved her Salon, and her heart which loved to get 
back to the husband she worshipped, and the child 
who was to divide her from him. 

Her relationship to Germaine belongs to Germaine's 
history rather than to her own. It suffices to say here 
that, as a mother, Madame Necker was governed by 
that passionate and morbid desire to do right which 
ruled her whole life, and that she was always so sternly 
seeking the child's real good that she had no time 



MADAME NECKER 103 

for the little tendernesses which gain a child's heart. 
When was it she felt first for the gay and engaging 
little creature, who appealed to a side of M. Necker's 
nature which the intense wife could never touch, a 
sudden and miserable jealousy? Suzanne was at no 
time a petty woman. But to see this charming, vain, 
clever, naughty little daughter taking up all the time 
and attention that once were only hers ! That was 
too much. The father spoilt the child and laughed 
with her. They had a hundred little understandings 
from which Madame felt herself shut out. She 
watched them — when was he ever so light-hearted 
with her? — fond, stern, and wretched. She thought 
she suffered only because Monsieur interfered with 
her scheme of education. She was always communing 
on the subject with her own sore heart. She wrote 
pages and pages of prayers, as ecstatic as a fasting 
nun's, iter troubles were not lessened when Germaine 
grew up into a most vivacious and accomplished girl. 
The daughter must be married — for her good. Suzanne 
wanted her to be the wife of Pitt. And Pitt said, " I 
am married to my country." So in 1786, and in 
default of better, Germaine was given to the Baron 
de Stael-Holstein, lived near her parents, and became 
at length the presiding genius of their Salon in the 
Rue Bergere. 

Was this time, which should have been the happiest, 
one of the most wretched of Madame Necker's life ? 
No one can lightly say that troubles which come 



104 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

chiefly from one's own morbid temperament deserve 
no compassion. There is no cure for them but some 
cruel blow from fate. For it is only in the presence 
of a real misfortune one knows no imaginary ones. 

Madame sat by while the daughter, unconsciously 
perhaps, and certainly with no evil intentions, took 
her adherents from her. They talked politics. Ger- 
maine could (and did) talk about anything. Madame's 
bent was literary and not political. She was suffering 
much in health at this time, and her old vivacity — 
was this the Themire of Crassier and Lausanne ? — failed 
her. Her friends, Thomas, Buffon, Diderot, were dying 
or dead. There was impassioned talk of the times 
that were coming — nay, were come — upon France. 
Madame did not need such fearful anticipations to 
fill her cup of misfortune. Her own self-torment had 
filled it to the brim. It was M. Necker who said of 
his wife that to make her entirely delightful in society 
she only needed one thing — to have something to for- 
give herself. She seemed outwardly stern, righteous, 
and cold. But what a morbid self-reproach in those 
prayers — what a mistrust of everything, of the husband 
who loved her so much, of the daughter she loved 
not a little ! When the enormous task of introducing 
his great plans for financial and administrative reform 
made Monsieur worried and preoccupied, Madame 
thought he was cold to her because her beauty was 
fading and her youth gone. When he disapproved 
of her talent for writing (which indeed she turned 



MADAME NECKER 105 

too often to morbid uses), she offered to destroy her 
Essay on Fenelon if he would give up his direction 
of the India Company. The inequality of the bargain 
did not occur to her. She was passionately devoted 
to him. But she did not rise to that better devotion 
which would have helped him to do his duty, even 
if the path to it had to be cut through her own 
heart. 

Perhaps she was easier in mind when they went 
to Coppet — the estate near Geneva, which they bought 
in 1784. Here, in the presence of the great quiet 
mountains, with their peaceful slopes of field and 
forest, her jealous mind may well have been more 
at rest. Her unhappiness was always partially phys- 
ical. If one could but have stayed here ! If one 
could but have got away for ever from the political 
whirlpool which engulfed one's husband, from the 
social life which brought one into rivalry with one's 
own child ! 

In 1781 M. Necker had "resigned his official situa- 
tion (which he had kept for five years) as Controller- 
General of the Treasury. 

From 1781 to 1788 he was out of place, though 
hardly out of power, and spent his time in schemes 
for the good of his country and in defending his past 
acts. In 1788 he was recalled as Controller-General. 

It was on July 11, 1789, when Monsieur and 
Madame were entertaining a party of friends at 
dinner, that he received his letter of banishment from 



106 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Louis XYI. He put it in his pocket and said nothing. 
After, he told Madame. She rose to the occasion as 
such a woman would. When there was so great a 
cause for emotion she forgot to be emotional, and 
only thought of her husband. They ordered the 
carriage as if they had been going to take a summer 
evening drive. They made an excuse to their guests. 
They told Germaine nothing, for fear in her grief 
she should have been indiscreet. If the mob — that 
wild mob of Paris, always in a frenzy of love or 
hatred — knew that Necker, their idol, was being taken 
from them, they would bring him back by force in 
triumph. Madame, who was in wretched health, did 
not even wait to change her dress. They never rested 
day or night until they reached Brussels. Germaine 
found them there three days later, worn and travel- 
stained, and otherwise just as they had left the dinner- 
table on that memorable evening. They had only 
reached Frankfurt when they received the king's 
urgent and passionate recall. The Bastille had fallen ; 
Paris was mad for the man the monarch had dis- 
graced. What were the feelings of these people as 
they were led back in glory, with the mob applaud- 
ing them, drums beating, music playing, " a host of 
cavalry, infantry, and citizens" guarding them, chil- 
dren throwing flowers, women singing, and the flags 
of what once was the Bastille waving in the air? 
The father and daughter shared that "universal in- 
toxication" of joy. Perhaps Madame's more fore- 



MADAME NECKER 107 

boding soul was fearful of such a wild success — 
suspicious of that frenzied worship. She was with 
her husband in the City Hall, where the people wept 
at his words and he seemed to them " as a god." He 
was reinstated in his high functions in the Govern- 
ment, and, with his wife, took up his residence at 
Versailles. 

On the morning of October 5, that great day of 
the Insurrection of Women, when the "ten thousand 
Judiths" advanced upon the palace, Madame de Stael 
hurried there to her parents, fearful, as she might well 
be, for their safety. Outside was "an infernal host," 
" an immense people." Within, M. Necker hastened to 
the king. His wife followed him to the Salon next the 
king's, that whatever might be her husband's fate she 
might share it. In this supreme crisis, when every 
moment one lived through made history, she would seem 
to have been at her best and her serenest. The next day, 
when Marie Antoinette returned from that immortal 
scene on the balcony, when Lafayette kissed her hand 
and the fickle people shouted " her name to the very 
clouds," it was to Madame Necker she turned saying, 
sobbing, "They force the king and myself to go to 
Paris with the heads of our bodyguard borne on the 
pikes." 

Suzanne was spared that cruel scene, and drove back 
to the capital with her husband and daughter on a 
smiling autumn day through the Bois de Boulogne. 
What was in her heart ? Could her husband even now 



108 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

save France ? He himself said it was too late. The tide 
rushed on to the Terror, and a greater than Necker could 
not have stemmed it. Suzanne implored him to retire 
and save himself before that public feeling, upon which 
no man could rely for an hour, turned against him, and 
made salvation impossible. She had always been for 
peace and obscurity. Who shall say that when they 
went to Coppet, but a little more than a year after that 
great recall to power, the wife's heart was all sad? 
They left their country, indeed, in a condition past hope. 
The world that began so brilliantly for her husband lay 
in ruins at his feet. But now the wife, who had been a 
part of his life, might perhaps be all of it ! If Madame 
Necker had some such feelings, she was not the first 
woman who has known them, and will not be the 
last. 

The arrival at Coppet in September 1790 was dismal 
enough. M. Necker wrote much. Suzanne had a 
gloomy room looking out over the park, and fell into 
that old, bad habit of brooding, brooding, brooding. 
Gibbon came over from Lausanne, where he was writing 
his "Roman Empire," to stay with them. He had 
stayed with them before this in Paris, and they had 
a comfortable friendship for him, and a very sincere 
admiration for his talents. Did he or Suzanne re- 
member those old days when they first met ? He 
wrote of her to Lord Sheffield: "Madame Necker's 
outward manner is better; mais le diable n'y perd 
rien." And she loved her husband with that absorbing 



MADAME NECKER 109 

devotion which admits no other affection. Madame de 
Stael came from the red heart of the Revolution to 
join her parents, and Coppet was a shelter for many 
refugees. 

Madame Necker's condition of health was now very 
unsatisfactory. Her conduct to her mother at that 
bitter time — how many long years ago ! — preyed upon 
her mind. Perhaps Coppet itself, with its thick, dark 
avenues of trees and great solitary rooms, was not very 
good for a melancholy temperament. She tried to 
collect her friends in the neighbourhood round her; 
but could she help thinking often of an earlier visit 
there, when they saw her famous and prosperous ? M. 
Necker, "abandoned by his friends, vilified by his 
enemies, disowned by his country," could not always 
have been a cheerful companion. 

By 1792 Madame was really ill. The great doctors 
saw her. But who can minister to a mind diseased? 
A happy temperament is either a gift from the gods or 
the fruit of one's owu effort. If no one could give ease 
and rest to the fortunate young wife of the successful 
banker, how should they find it for this grey-haired 
woman ? A passionate loathing for Coppet took pos- 
session of her heart. She was moved to Robe, from 
where she wrote her farewell letter to her husband, 
which he must have read after her death. She thought 
her soul would still watch over his fate. Before this she 
had had a great desire that her body should be em- 
balmed instead of buried. A thousand morbid fancies 



110 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

took possession of her. This woman, who had always 
tried to be good, was haunted by such a fear of death as 
an evil conscience is often spared. 

She was taken to Lausanne to be under Tissot. The 
last thing she ever wrote was her will, dated January 6, 
1794. She made provision out of her very little dot for 
her maid, for some of her poor people, and some distant 
relatives; asked her husband to supply the further 
money the dot would not cover; and then, with that 
doubting heart which was her torment, reproached her- 
self for having thus appealed to his generosity. 

Her last months were passed in dreadful bodily 
suffering ; but her husband's devotion must have 
killed even her distrust. Germaine, too, was with her 
mother. Oh, how small, seen from the threshold of 
another world, must have looked the jealousies which 
made this one miserable ! The daughter sang to her 
sometimes. When she was alone the sick woman 
prayed fervently out loud. Often, worn by fatigue, 
she fell asleep on her husband's arm, and he remained 
in the same position for hours rather than disturb her. 
She turned to him once to say, " I fear death, for with 
you I loved life." At last, when she was too weak to 
speak, she stretched out her hand to him. She died 
May 6, 1794. 

Oh, what a stormy soul was this, and under that cold 
exterior what a full and throbbing heart! There is 
hardly any other famous woman in whom the idea of 
duty was so overmastering and persistent as it was in 



MADAME NECKER 111 

this one. Was she, indeed, as Madame du Deffand 
described her, " rigid, frigid, and good " ? Was her 
virtue often forbidding and severe ? She lived in an 
age when, if a woman's virtue was not severe, she had 
none. The very intensity of her feelings made her 
seem stern. If she had loved her husband less absorb- 
ingly, she might have been easier to live with. If she 
had been less passionately desirous of her daughter's 
real good, she might have been a more judicious mother. 
Some irony of fate always pursued her. If few have 
tried so hard to do well, many with less effort have 
done better. In considering Madame Necker, one must 
remember always that " it is not what man does that 
exalts him, but what a man would do." 

As a philanthropist she founded a famous hospital, 
and, like her husband, was sincerely devoted to the 
good of the people. 

Religion was the mainstay of her life, and remained 
an absorbing conviction, though there was hardly one 
of her friends who shared it, and scepticism was in the 
air she breathed. 

It was Madame Necker who wrote : " I am every day 
astonished at the moral perversion which withers all 
minds and all hearts. Vices or virtues are alike indif- 
ferent, provided only conversation is animated, and 
ennui, outmost dreaded plague, is banished." 

As an authoress, she was as ecstatic as she was in her 
prayers and her heart. 

Her Reflexions sur le Divorce are the most passionate 



112 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

and touching argument for the sanctity of marriage. 
Her Melanges, published by her husband after her 
death, are rich in axioms and epigrams. 

If there was another woman of the eighteenth cen- 
tury whose judgment was so unperverted by its shams, 
she is hard to find. 

At Coppet, where first Bayle, and then the greatest 
financier and his daughter, the most brilliant literary 
woman of modern times, lived, and where all nature has 
that supreme serenity which is peculiar to a moun- 
tainous lake country, may still be seen the tomb where 
rests at last the passionate heart of the woman who 
began the world at little Crassier, not six miles away, as 
the minister's daughter, Suzanne Curchod. 




<&aJ£^ 6 &<&atlt..fLA..j<.. 



> tf(iitf{?ji.e ae <y/s/s/ . 



MADAME DE STAEL 

There is no more dazzling figure in modern European 
history than Madame de Stael. The daughter of 
Necker and the Revolution, she lived to see the new 
condition of society which was ushered in by the 
battle of Waterloo. She was the connecting link 
between the, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 
Brought up in an age when women influenced greatly 
indeed, but influenced exclusively from their own 
homes and Salons, she ran about Europe always talking 
and always writing, carrying on an immortal warfare 
with Bonaparte — the newest of new women, as she 
was certainly the cleverest and the most extraordinary. 
She made for herself a life which the concisest of 
encyclopaedists and biographers seem unable to com- 
press into the usual half column. She plunged into 
politics. She was stateswoman, novelist, playwriter, 
actress, metaphysician, patriot, intriguer, musician, 
philosopher. What was she not ? As a Saloniere her 
Salon was nothing. It was only its mistress who 
counted. Its habitues were there, not to talk with 
each other, but to listen to her. In the other Salons 
it was the men who made history. In this, it was 
the woman who whispered in their ear, who suggested 

113 h 



114 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

this, proposed that, and made them say at the Tribunat 
to-morrow, what she thought in her rooms to-night. 
So that Napoleon said, " Ce n'est point un salon, c'est 
un club " — and exiled her. 

Born in Paris, April 22, 1766, Germaine was almost 
from the first a cause of disagreement between the 
parents who loved her. Papa was so gay, and mamma 
so strict ! The bright, ugly, black-eyed baby distracted 
M. Necker with her infant vivacity from the great 
cares of his position. He was the best of playfellows. 
At what absurd age does a little woman discover that 
one admires her, and finds her small sayings laughable, 
and her small ways charming? When her mother 
received, Germaine sat by her side on a very straight- 
backed little chair (Madame thought straight-backed 
chairs and uncomfortableness in themselves virtuous 
and regenerating to the soul), and listened with a 
very keen little mind, which no doubt took in much 
more than that righteous mother fancied, to the 
most brilliant conversation of an age gorgeous in its 
setting. 

All the guests spoke to the little girl. Here were 
Grimm, Raynal, Thomas, Marmontel, who especially 
loved to draw her out. Be sure Germaine replied to 
them with a perfect confidence. It was not, indeed, a 
very good bringing-up for a small person naturally 
not a little vain. 

She was still quite a child when she was writing to 
her mother : — 



MADAME DE STAEL 115 

"My dear Mamma, — I want to write to you. My 
heart is drawn tight. I am sad, and in this large 
house I see now only a desert." 

And again : 

"Let me kiss you a thousand times, and press you 
to a heart that belongs only to you and papa." 

Before the practical English mind condemns the 
letter-writer as an affected little poseuse, it should 
remember that Germaine was a French child, and that 
when she was no longer a child she never knew an 
emotion — and she knew many and passionate ones — 
without talking or writing about it. 

Some painter should put on canvas that garden 
scene at St. Ouen, where she was sent as a girl to 
recover her health after too much brain-work, and 
where, with a little Mademoiselle Huber, she amused 
herself by declaiming tragic verses, and reciting plays 
and poems, dressed in white like a wood nymph. She 
was not at all pretty. She was never pretty. She 
had rather coarse features, and a certain bold brilliancy 
of expression, not all attractive. But then every fresh 
feeling re-created her face. She was at this time 
divinely young. And her ugliness was now, as later, 
so clever that it interested more than any placid beauty. 

She had written tragedies before she was grown up. 
She had a mind that dared anything. She had already 
begun to idolise her father with that idolatry which 
only died at her death. She herself said that the 
enlevement of Richardson's Clarissa was one of the 



116 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

events of her childhood, and might well have exclaimed 
with the heroine of another novel, " II me faut des 
emotions ! " " That which amused her was that which 
made her weep," wrote Mademoiselle Huber. There 
was no other girl in the world — not even another 
French girl — who was at sixteen or seventeen years 
old such a brilliant compound of genius, vanity, in- 
spiration, sentiment, and impulse as Germaine Necker. 

The richest heiress in France was just twenty when 
she married the Baron de Stael-Holstein, Swedish 
Ambassador in Paris. He was much older than her- 
self. He was nobody. He only lent his wife a name 
which she was to render immortal. They separated 
pretty soon without making any extraordinary fuss 
about the parting. A friend of de StaeTs said that 
he was always "sincerely attached to his charming 
wife, although she showed entire indifference to him." 
That may have been so. But perhaps the Baron 
found with Lamartine, that "celebrity is like a fire 
which burns when one is close to it, and gives light 
when one is away from it. Happy he who is far from 
a woman's glory ! " 

With her marriage began that torrent of events 
which formed Madame's life. 

She was still a very young wife when the long- 
smouldering misery of her country broke into flame. 
She had an absorbing passion for liberty. She had 
already published her "Letters on the Works and 
Character of Jean Jacques Rousseau," which are them- 



MADAME DE STAEL 117 

selves a clever girl's passionate hero-worship for the 
man "without whom," said Napoleon r "there would 
have been no revolution in France." Before the meet- 
ing of the States-General — that "baptism day of 
democracy," "the extreme unction day of feudalism" — 
she watched from a window the great procession of 
the twelve hundred deputies with an exultant joy. It 
remained for another woman, much less brilliant and 
further-seeing, to say, "Do not rejoice; out of this 
day will arrive frightful disasters to France and to us." 

Madame was with her father at his disgrace and at 
his recall to power. It was the Millennium — it was 
the Golden Age — it was Utopia ! And to-day she 
was at Versailles and the great Insurrection of Women. 
As soon as possible after the birth of her son in the 
dramatic August of 1790, she joined her parents at 
Coppet. But, " I have all Switzerland in a magnificent 
horror," she wrote, and rushed back to Paris. 

It was supremely characteristic of her now and al- 
ways that she should find anything better than inaction. 
She must be moving, doino:, to the fore. A Kevolution 
— and I not in it ? Social Paris still sociable, though 
its streets run with blood — and I not there to talk? 
There is no human face that expresses such an extra- 
ordinary degree of vitality and energy as Madame de 
StaeTs. She arrived in her dearest capital, and started 
there the first, the most brilliant, and the most influential 
of her Salons, the Salon of the Kevolution. 

It is pre-eminently of French society that it can be 



118 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

said that it is at its liveliest and wittiest in a time of 
anarchy and confusion. If one is French one must 
amuse oneself. And if, without, there is tragedy and 
ruin, why, within, only the more need to distract one's 
thoughts. In this Salon, besides, there was not only 
laughter. Here met the old nobility, and the men of 
the tiers etats. The habitues were Talleyrand, Barnave, 
Chenier, Lafayette, Lally Tollendal, Narbonne, and Ben- 
jamin Constant. Madame did not lead the conversation 
gently, imperceptibly, as did the Salonieres of those 
old Salons of that old world, gone for ever. Her per- 
sonality dominated the room. Those flashing black eyes, 
those full, passionate lips, could never have belonged to 
a woman content to be merely tender and charming. 
She wanted to make felt her power, and the genius of 
which she was supremely conscious — and could but be 
conscious. She talked politics in a fire of enthusiasm. 
She wrote "the most important part of Talleyrand's 
Report on Public Instruction in 1791," and then was 
imploring Barras, the only member of the Birectoire 
admitted here, to spare one or another victim of that 
insatiable monster, universal anarchy. 

Before long she was saving her friends by her own 
exertions. She hid Narbonne in her house, and, with 
that infinite wit and resource which never deserted her, 
prevented the officials from searching it. If she ever 
was, as Sismondi said, excessivement poltronne, she 
certainly did not show it now. She had, instead, the 
mettle and pluck of a war-horse. On that awful day 



MADAME DE STAEL 119 

of the Massacre of September she tried to escape to 
Coppet. She was stopped and taken to the Hotel de 
Ville, escorted by that rnob who the next day murdered 
the Lamballe with nameless atrocities. The carriage 
was three hours in getting through the streets. The 
people, goaded to madness by its aristocratic appearance, 
howled blasphemies and death. The gendarmes would 
not help her, except one, who was with her in the car- 
riage, and fell under the potent charm of her cleverness, 
and promised to save her with his life. In the Hotel 
de Ville she was brought before Robespierre. Manuel, 
the " procureur of the Commune," and her friend, found 
her there, and, after many hours of waiting, conducted 
her, in the safe shelter of the darkness, through mid- 
night Paris to her home. The next morning she left 
for Coppet. There is no scene in either of her novels 
half so dramatic as the story of that September day. 
If she had written her own romance of the Revolution, 
it would have outlived many Corinnes and Delphines. 

Early in 1793 she paid her first visit to England. 
She joined the little colony of emigres at Mickleham. 
They were all very gay, witty, and poor. Neither 
poverty nor the horrible scenes they had come from 
(and in which they must have left many of those dear 
to them) prevented them from entertaining each other, 
and forming little Salons and picnic parties after the 
light-hearted manner of their nation. Their morals 
were by no means too strict, said English respectability. 
Some people gave Narbonne to Madame de Stael as a 



120 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

lover. The Miss Berrys disapproved of her. Madame 
was to the fore in this society, as she was in all societies. 
She recited tragedies, and read aloud the first chapter 
of her " Influence of the Passions on the Happiness of 
Nations and Individuals." When she had found time 
to write it, Heaven knows. How she found time to 
write any of her works, much less to think of them, is 
certainly known to no one in this world. "Since you 
sleep all night, and act or talk all day," said her cousin 
and biographer, "when do you reflect and study ?" "In 
my sedan chair," replied Madame, with her inimitable 
confidence. And she was back again at Coppet, writing 
her " Reflections on the Trial of the Queen," with her 
impassioned pen dipped in the impulsive pity of an 
ardent heart; weeping for the death of her mother; 
and then back again in Paris, ruling her Salon of the 
Directoire, and fighting tooth and nail that greatest 
of fighters, Napoleon Bonaparte. 

The history of their quarrel is, after all, only the 
history of two powers who both wanted to be absolute 
in the same territory. It has been said that it was 
unworthy the manhood of Napoleon to persecute a 
woman. But it would certainly have been inconsistent 
with his matchless cleverness to have ignored the 
" talent and influence " of her whom he called a " rest- 
less intriguer," with " a mania for writing about every- 
thing and of nothing." There could be no higher 
compliment to her power and genius than that Bonaparte 
feared them, just as there is no better testimony to his 



MADAME DE STAEL 121 

unique ability than that Dix Anne'es d'Exil which she 
wrote to expose his character. 

To this her second Salon — her Salon of the Consulate 
or the Directoire — came at first his brothers Lucien 
and Joseph. She could influence them. 

She influenced, too, the journalists and the news- 
paper editors who now rubbed shoulders in her rooms 
with aristocrats who were still wearing the humble 
clothes which they had first donned as a protection in 
the Terror. The great ladies of the old regime were not 
at all above meeting here the men of those classes 
once called lower — of imploring of them, of gaining 
from them, by flatteries to which only love could 
have made them stoop, the restoration of exiled 
friends. 

Madame herself was hardly of these great ladies. 
There was a coarseness about her somehow, in her 
strong passions, overweening energy, and vaulting 
ambition, which had very little of the calm and re- 
finement, and a thousand times more life and vigour 
than ever ran in the blue blood of a dying aristocracy. 
It is a marvel that she could have held her Salon 
for an hour, in spite of a Napoleon. For that most 
"exquisite pleasure" of her life, "the pleasure of 
conversing in Paris," she fought with all her talents 
and powers. 

Her adherents slunk away from her at last, afraid 
to stay ; and Madame, undaunted, published her " Essay 
on Literature," won them back in spite of themselves 



122 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

and of danger, talked once more as well and as much 
as it was only given to her to talk, brought out " Del- 
phine" at Geneva, and in 1803 was banished by 
Napoleon to forty leagues from Paris. 

If one could not be in the capital, there was no good 
in being in France at all. To be out of Paris was 
extinction! All the loveliness of Lake Leman only 
caused Madame to exclaim, "Oh for the gutter of 
the Rue du Bac!" She was still panting from the 
effects of her fight with Napoleon, and not more in a 
frame of mind to approach sober German philosophy 
than the great calm of nature, when she rushed fran- 
tically to Metz, Frankfort, Weimar, Berlin, and the 
acquaintance of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland. 

It was not, everything considered, very surprising 
that these grave thinkers found themselves unable 
to judge Madame wholly kindly. She was the more 
generous. She was always a warm admirer. She was 
not, it would seem, less self-confident now than usual. 
She argued philosophy with Geothe with the same 
impassioned brilliancy and ignorance of the subject 
as, later on, said Byron, " she preached English politics 
to the first of our English Whig politicians the day 
after her arrival in England." 

She chatted vivaciously on subjects to the study of 
which her listeners had given all their lives, their 
deepest earnestness, and their profoundest thought. 
" To philosophise in society," said one of them, writing 
of her with not a little bitterness, " means to talk with 



MADAME DE STAEL 123 

vivacity about insoluble problems." These heavy people 
were in the dumps and must be roused ! Madame 
plunged headlong into discussions where men and 
angels fear to tread. She was much too impulsive to 
be reverent. She always wanted to be first, to attract 
notice, "to excite passion, no matter what." She did 
not wait to hear her adversary's reply. She jumped 
at the cleverest conclusions. Her whole genius was 
inspiration. "The altogether unprecedented glibness 
of her tongue," of which the grave Teutons complained, 
did not leave her a single moment for reflection or 
for self-distrust. When Robinson said to her later, 
"Madame, you did not understand Goethe, and you 
will never understand him," she replied, "Monsieur, I 
understand everything that is worth understanding; 
that which I don't understand is nothing." This was 
the key to all her brilliant mind, to her whole mental 
attitude towards the deepest intellects of her century. 

There is no wonder that such a very naive vanity 
should have been ill content with the "moderate 
German plaudits" given to her reading and reciting 
in public. It is not a little to the credit of her mag- 
nanimity that, though these stupid people did not 
worship her half so enthusiastically as they ought, 
she was even now taking notes for her De VAUemagne, 
that book which has been well called "the revelation 
of the genius of Germany to the French people." 

In 1804 the illness and death of her father recalled 
her to Coppet. She mourned him with a very loud 



124 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

and a very sincere grief; but, whether he was alive 
or dead, his daughter must be moving, doing, a power 
in the world. She ran through Italy in an ecstasy. 
She wrote "Corinne" in another. She finished it at 
a friend's house very near Paris — to which she was 
creeping back, in spite of Napoleon. After its publica- 
tion, and the roar of delight with which it was received, 
he banished her anew. It is supremely characteristic 
of the woman that, although she declared he had no 
heart, she was everlastingly appealing to it; that, 
though she herself said, "Demosthenes and Cicero 
combined could not lead him to the least sacrifice of 
his personal interest," she never ceased to try upon 
him the effect of her own eloquence and cleverness. 

She went back to Coppet. She held there a kind of 
Salon. She wrote plays and acted in them. Among 
her guests were the exquisite Juliette Recamier (for 
whose loveliness Madame de Stael said she would 
give all her own genius), Bonsetten, Werner, Prince 
Augustus of Prussia, and the inevitable Benjamin 
Constant. But even the society of her friends — and 
of such friends — could not make Coppet endurable 
for long. She went to Germany a second time, taking 
Constant with her. She had that famous interview 
with Goethe's mother when she appeared dressed as 
" Corinne " in " an orange and blue turban, a robe of 
the same, an orange tunic, with a very short waist 
. . . and the usual laurel twig in her hand." She must 
have been now about forty years old, stout, snuff-taking, 



MADAME DE STAEL 125 

and it must be presumed, without any very keen sense 
of the ridiculous. She met Fichte, and asked him to 
give her an account, " in fifteen minutes or so," of that 
famous system which it had taken him all his life and 
genius to evolve. The disgust of the poor man may 
be imagined. He had not spoken for ten minutes 
when she interrupted him — " It is enough ; I compre- 
hend, I comprehend perfectly" — and told him a little 
anecdote from "Munchausen's Travels" to illustrate 
his theory of " I " and " me " ! It is impossible to con- 
ceive of another mind at once so clever and so inade- 
quate. Madame's intellect was like her life: it puts 
one out of breath to follow it. 

She was at Coppet again now, writing Be VAllemagne, 
acting plays, entertaining friends, and having her por- 
trait painted as " Corinne," seated on a rock with a lyre 
in her hand, by Madame Vigee le Brun. The sitter 
declaimed tragic passages from Corneille and Racine, to 
give her face the proper expression. She was the best 
of actresses — of the kind that are born, not made. She 
published her Be VAllemagne, that "most masculine 
production of the faculties of woman," and was exiled 
for it. These banishments gave her so much excite- 
ment, and so much fame, that to such a nature as hers 
they could not have been an unmixed evil. But she 
was coming — nay, had come — to that time when she 
realised to the full how little even such a celebrity as 
hers was satisfying, and that " the love of all is but a 
small thing to the love of one." 



126 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Her husband was dead. Her relations with Benjamin 
Constant — whatever those relations may once have 
been — were certainly now not more than friendship. 
To that bored and brilliant cynic she had played a part 
at least not all ignoble ; she had made him do what 7 ; he 
could. She was a middle-aged woman — who ought to 
have known better, said the (world, when it heard the 
story hereafter — when she fell in love with de Rocca. 
M. de Rocca was a French officer who had distinguished 
himself in Spain and returned home ^wounded, and 
was young, brave, chivalrous, and enthusiastic. It was 
Madame's fame which first attracted him to her, no 
doubt. And on her side ? A passion which has been 
looked upon as almost exclusively ridiculous, places her 
character, not the less, in its best light. What had 
she to gain by marrying him ? She had everything to 
lose. If it was a folly, it was a generous folly. There 
is nothing so pathetic in her history as her passionate 
conviction that there is no blessing in life comparable 
to a happy marriage. It is her cousin who says, very 
truly, that the inconvenience of love-matches ?is " pre- 
cisement qu'on ne choisit pas." Madame had to suffer 
many of these inconveniences. She kept her secret, 
indeed, as much as such a woman could. It was^ not 
till after her death that every one knew of her impru- 
dence and her happiness; but if she had had to lose 
the world for it, to her it would have been the world 
well lost. 

The natural imprevoyance of her character could 



MADAME DE STAEL 127 

not prevent her from having much anxiety about her 
husband's precarious health. "There is only one un- 
happiness in life," she said, "the death of what one 
loves." 

In 1812 their child was born. By now, the rigid 
surveillance of Napoleon had become intolerable to 
Madame's energetic spirit. She escaped from Coppet 
on May 23, 1812, with de Kocca, and her son and 
daughter de Stael, to Vienna, and through Austria 
to Russia and Sweden. On the journey were many 
narrow escapes from the vigilance of the tyrant, and 
dramatic adventures which quite suited Madame's 
penchant for the picturesque. She stayed six months 
in Sweden, and, after twenty years absence from it, 
visited England once more. 

This visit was throughout in the nature of a trium- 
phal progress. England did not like Madame less 
because Bonaparte hated her. Her talents had made 
her not only the first woman in France, but the first 
woman in Europe. Hundreds of these cold English- 
women had sobbed over her " Corinne " and " Delphine." 
The most exclusive of the great houses flung open their 
doors to her. She visited Lord and Lady Jersey, Lord 
and Lady Hardwicke, Lord Liverpool. She was at the 
Hollands' and at Rogers' literary dinners. Among her 
acquaintances were Canning, Lord Grey, Campbell, 
Bowles, Croker, Coleridge, Byron, Sir James Macintosh, 
Wilberforce — all the celebrities of the time. Her ap- 
pearance at a party created a furore. People got on 



128 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

the chairs and tables to see her. This "spiritual 
Amazon," this constellation to whom all the stars sang 
Te Deum, talked, harangued, lectured, argued every- 
where. Sir James Macintosh said he had dined with 
her " at the houses of almost all the Cabinet ministers." 
" The most active, combative, and voluble of all the 
human beings I ever met," could put her volubility 
into four languages — German, English, Italian, and 
French. She quoted Latin. She had a "very good 
battle " with Lord Wellesley at Holland House on the 
Spanish treaty. The superior knowledge of her adver- 
sary did not daunt her in the least. Byron spoke of 
her society as an " avalanche." The social rules which 
bound other people had no hold upon her. " Mrs. 
Corinne always lingers so long after dinner," said the 
poet again, " that we wish her — in the drawing-room." 
When the Be I'Allemagne, suppressed in France, was 
published in London, the shout of applause was deafen- 
ing. Jeffrey had already called her, on the strength of 
" Corinne," " the greatest writer in France since Voltaire 
and Rousseau, and the greatest female writer of any 
age or country." What was her position now? To 
this woman with her " strong passion for fame " such a 
universal worship must have been intoxicating indeed. 
It proves that, with all her faults, there must have been 
something not a little noble in her, that, though she 
drank deeper of the nectar of celebrity than any woman 
has drunk of it before or after her, she never doubted 
that the best thing in life was not fame, but love. 



MADAME DE STAEL 129 

She went home. The battle of Waterloo had given 
the French nation another of those changes which it 
needs, said Napoleon, about every three months to 
captivate its imagination. " With it, whoever does not 
advance is lost." 

At her brilliant Salon of the Restoration — "more 
instructive than a book and more amusing than a 
play " — Madame received the Duke of Wellington, and 
could not help saying of him to a friend in a whisper, 
" II faut pourtant convenir que jamais la nature n'a fait 
un grand homme a moins de frais." She was now fifty. 
But her heart had the passion and vigour of twenty. 
Such a woman could never grow old. 

She was at Pisa with her husband, her daughter, and 
Schlegel. De Rocca's health was wretched. It caused 
Madame an intermittent and tempestuous fear, which 
in deeper hearts is replaced by that persistent, dull ache 
called anxiety. Before this her mother had, in her 
own words, forced Mademoiselle de Stael to make a 
marriage of inclination. 

In June 1816 she returned to Coppet. She re- 
ceived Byron, whom England, having worshipped, had 
turned and rent. Was it not characteristic at once of 
Madame's boundless self-reliance and of her impulsive 
heart, that one of the last acts of her life should have 
been to attempt a reconciliation between the poet and 
his wife? She died, after one of the most eventful 
and extraordinary lives ever led by a woman. 

Madame de Stael took her own generation by storm. 



130 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

She inspired everywhere an enthusiasm of love or 
hatred. There was no medium. The time is not yet 
come when she can be regarded with that cold and 
disinterested eye which is supposed to search out truth. 
Her ample and vivid personality still takes one in 
possession. Her rush of words, her rush of feeling, her 
inimitable intellectual daring, her supreme conceit, 
and her strong passions, leave the beholder breath- 
less, astounded, and in a frame of mind essentially 
unjudicial. 

In her bold inconsistency and her marvellous intui- 
tions she was supremely a woman. She was supremely 
unwomanly in her amazing egoism and her lust for 
fame. Take refuge with her from the battle of life 
without ? She was herself a battle. Her love was a 
torrent of generous and undisciplined emotion. " If she 
gives herself up to her impetuous nature," said Ben- 
jamin Constant, " there is a commotion like a thunder- 
storm or an earthquake. . . . Did she but know how to 
govern herself, she could govern the world." That is 
her whole character summed up in little. 

Her works are personal in an extraordinary degree. 
It is "I," "me," "my," always. The most famous of 
her books are full of appeal, of insistence that the 
world should admire, not German literature or a 
heroine of romance, but Anne Germaine Necker de 
Stael-Holstein. 

"Delphine" is not -immoral French fiction half so 
much as it is a brilliant girl's passionate cry for enjoy- 



MADAME DE STAEL 131 

ment — the outburst of a very young heart that could 
not yet quite believe that " we were not sent into the 
world to be happy, but to be right." 

"Corinne," that "chef-d'oeuvre of the youth of her 
talent," is a picture of Italy photographed upon a most 
poetic heart. Corinne crowned at the Capitol, Corinne 
with her lyre, her beautiful sentiments, and her pas- 
sionate grief, has all the ardour and genius and the 
lack of stern, cool common- sense of the real Corinne, 
Madame de Stael. The authoress always wrote, as it 
were, with the blood of her heart. Her cousin calls 
" Delphine " the book " where she has said everything." 
Her genius and weakness alike consisted in this. She 
always said everything. She put down what she felt at 
the moment. She never paused to reflect what effect 
the record of those feelings would have on other minds. 
She never corrected or thought over what she had 
written. When the hour for reflection had come she 
was busy composing something else. She wrote in all 
places and at all times. When some one read her a 
passage out of one of her own works, "That is very 
beautiful," she said, " did I indeed write that ? " In 
the stream of publications with which she flooded the 
world she might well forget a few flowing phrases. 
If her feelings were always changing, they were not 
the less acute feelings for the time. "Corinne" and 
"Delphine" will never altogether die, because when 
they were written they came straight from the heart 
of the woman who wrote them, and abound in those 



132 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

touches of nature which make all men kin. The 
supreme achievement of Madame's talent was doubtless 
De UAllemagne. She studied for it for six years. It 
was part of her cleverness that when it was finished it 
appeared to have in it the research of a lifetime. 

If her Dix Annies d'Exil revealed a great deal more 
of her own character than it did of Napoleon's, yet not 
the less, with her intuitive genius, she had her infidel a 
thousand times upon the hip. 

Her " Essay on Literature," which has been called 
" the greatest of all the literary productions of women," 
abounds in fine aphorisms, and has all the splendid 
dash and vigour which were pre-eminently the de 

Steel's, 

There 1 are few writers who have such quick-flowing 
grace of expression, and at once such warmth, such 
spirit, such passion, and such tenderness. 

It is Madame de Stael who loves to quote that inimi- 
table definition of Shelling, "architecture is frozen 
music." It is she herself who says, " Comprendre, c'est 
pardonner," and by the mouth of her dying Corinne, 
" Tout comprendre rend tres indulgent, et sentir pro- 
fondement inspire une grande bonte." It is the most 
famous woman of her century who finds that "for 
women glory is only a brilliant mourning worn for 
happiness," and that " everything which does not touch 
one's heart leaves one's life free." 

On a profounder subject she says, "The mystery of 
existence is the connection between our sins and our 



MADAME DE STAEL 183 

sorrows. I have never done a wrong which has not 
been the cause of a misfortune ; " and " One must take 
care, if one can, that the decline of this life be the 
youth of the next. To forget self without ceasing to 
be interested in others gives the soul something of the 
divine." 

All her thoughts have thus the softness of pearls or 
the sparkle of diamonds. They are exquisite gems for 
ornament, if they are not gold for use. 

Whatever be the judgment of future generations 
upon the talent of Madame de Stael, the woman herself 
is immortal. 

So long as human nature is an interesting study, so 
long will stand out clearly that strong figure in the 
flowing dress of the period, with the yellow turban on 
the black hair, the laurel twig in the hand, the flashing 
eyes and brilliant coarse face. 

The other Salonieres made their Salons their world. 
It was only this one who attempted to make the world 
her Salon. 



MADAME RECAMIER 

It takes perhaps a century for truth about a celebrity to 
be wound up from the bottom of its well.; Madame 
Kecamier has not yet been dead sixty years. Her 
biographies are the work of friends who wrote when 
they were still under the spell of her exquisite love- 
liness, or who were bound to her by the ties of kinship. 
The unfavourable criticisms on her are attributable to the 
jealousy of rivals. This last and least of the Salonieres 
is, therefore, the most difficult to consider. She herself 
wrote nothing, or practically nothing. From the enemies 
and the flatterers, therefore, and from chance allusions 
in contemporary memoirs and letters, one has to colour 
her picture as near to life as one can. 

Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Bernard had, as she 
might be expected to have had, a very handsome father 
and mother. M. Bernard was good-looking and stupid ; 
but Madame, his wife, was lovely, shrewd, and business- 
like. 

The little creature born to them at Lyons on Decem- 
ber 4, 1777, did not like any of those four fine Christian 
names, it appears, and elected to be called, or at any 
rate was called to the end of her life, Juliette. Juliette 

134 




Si 



MADAME KfiCAMIER 135 

found her first lover when she was about seven, and 
being educated by an aunt at Villefranche. The young 
gentleman was also about seven. The romance ended 
abruptly when Juliette was sent as a pupil to a certain 
convent of La Deserte, at Lyons. Years after she re- 
called, as in a " vague sweet dream," the calm convent 
garden, with its old-fashioned flowers, and the dim 
chapel, incense-scented, with its beautiful, mysterious 
rites, which have impressed children of a larger growth 
than Juliette for many centuries. 

What she learned at the convent does not much 
transpire. She went back to Paris and to her mother, 
who quickly perceived that Juliette's fortune in life was 
to be made by her beauty. Beauty unadorned was not 
at all to the taste of an age when even a Yigee le Brun 
painted a Marie Antoinette with a structure on her head 
which would have made a lesser loveliness entirely 
ridiculous ; so, no doubt, Madame Bernard was right in 
compelling her little girl to give up many hours to her 
toilette, and to realise at the earliest possible period the 
necessity of applying herself seriously to this gravest 
branch of female education. 

It would not appear that Juliette was now or ever 
vain. She grew up with her beauty, as it were, from 
her infancy. She accepted it, calmly complacent. It 
was not a part of herself. It was her whole self. The 
little creature, sitting hours and hours in front of her 
looking-glass, was as used to her own loveliness as she 
was to the exceedingly injudicious compliments to which 



136 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

she was always listening at the parties to which gay papa 
and mamma were continually taking her. 

Once they took her to see the king and queen dining, 
according to custom, in public at Versailles. The queen 
noticed the little Juliette. Her beauty always attracted 
attention, even a queen's, naturally, and as a matter of 
course. She was the same age as Madame Royale. 
The children must be measured ! Juliette was taken to 
the private apartments and measured with that other 
child, for whom Fate was preparing so widely different 
a destiny. Juliette was a little bit the taller. She was 
always, as it were, a little bit taller, a little bit lovelier, a 
little bit more charming, than any other woman. That 
was her career. 

At home Madame Bernard gave her just such an 
education as would make her beauty yet more attractive. 
She was taught the harp and sang to it. She played 
on the piano. When she was old she recalled that 
music of her youth, without notes, at twilight. She 
danced divinely. Does not one know, later, all about 
that shawl dance, which gave the de Stael one of the 
most charming scenes in her novels ? 

Juliette had the gayest early girlhood imaginable. 
There were innumerable parties at home ; and abroad 
— theatres, concerts, a thousand things. It was 1791— 
1792, and the Revolution was already at the gates. One 
may not be able to amuse oneself much longer ! » So 
much the more reason to be all the merrier while we 
can ! With what an awful literalness in these times 



MADAME RECAMIER 137 

was that saying fulfilled, "Let us eat and drink, for 
to-morrow we die." 

In that Annus Mirabilis 1793, a certain M. Recamier 
visited very assiduously chez Bernard. M. Recamier 
was a banker, very handsome, very gay, very charming, 
with the most delightful manners and the kindest heart. 
It was not at all wonderful that he should have fallen 
in love with the spring beauty of Juliette Bernard. 
There was but one drawback. M. Recamier was five- 
and-forty, and Juliette was hardly older than that other 
Juliet of the house of Capulet of Verona. 

It was an occasion on which one might have suspected 
a case of tearful loveliness and obdurate, worldly parents. 
But such a suspicion would have been unfounded. 
Juliette of Paris accepted the prosaic, elderly husband 
with that perfect equability which was to preserve her 
beauty long past an age when other women have wept 
theirs into wrinkles and crows' feet. It was destiny — 
and not a bad destiny. Let us take it philosophically ! 
If Juliette of Paris could not be called heartless, she 
had at least a very different order of heart to Juliet 
of Verona. 

In the very thick of the Revolution, then, Made- 
moiselle Bernard became Madame Recamier. It is 
one of the tragedies or one of the alleviations of life, 
as one chooses to take it, that though one half of the 
world be dying, the other half must needs go on laugh- 
ing, visiting, marrying, as under serener skies. M. 
Recamier saw many executions with his own eyes. 



138 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

His house and the Bernards' were protected by 
Barrere. Did this girl-wife at home tremble for the 
fate that had overtaken many she knew, and for fear 
it might overtake herself? Perhaps. Her life at first 
was a very secluded one. The ardour of the Salons 
even had been damped at last by so much blood. 
There were nothing but public entertainments now. 
In France it will take the Judgment Day to stop those. 
So, behind the veil of enforced privacy Juliette Ee- 
camier's beauty rose to that dazzling loveliness before 
which all descriptions fail. Her biographers, indeed, 
speak of the exquisite complexion, the little rounded 
arms, the delicate figure, the clustering dark hair — and 
convey nothing. The great David painted her, and was 
driven to despair by a beauty no canvas could repro- 
duce. Gerard had hardly more success. Later, Canova 
did her bust in marble. But what had marble and this 
warm, soft loveliness, with its tints of morning, in com- 
mon with each other ? If " the best part of beauty is 
that which a picture cannot express," Madame had that 
best part in an extraordinary degree. In the Louvre 
to-day thousands of people pass by her portrait un- 
noticing or disappointed. The sure testimony to the 
reality of her loveliness in life is the men who wor- 
shipped her, and Paris who went mad over it. 

When the churches were opened again, Madame 
collected for a fashionable charity at St. Roch, and 
her impulsive countrymen got on the side altars, and 
perhaps swarmed up the pillars, to look at her. She 



MADAME RECAMIER 139 

was no doubt serene, as always. Such a worship did 
not turn her head — hardly made that calm heart beat 
quicker. It was pleasant to be adored indeed — nay, 
it was the only thing worth living for. It was the 
end of education. Was it possibly also the end ot 
marriage with a man who would treat one in all 
respects as a father, and guard one sufficiently from 
the effects of those passions it was so pleasant and 
so dangerous to excite ? 

M. Recamier took, and furnished with a royal splen- 
dour, a house in the Rue de Blanc, belonging to M. 
Necker, where another Saloniere, much less calm and 
philosophic than Juliette, had once held her Salon. 
The maison Recamier was rising in the world. Beauty 
is a very long ladder to success, as every one knows. 
In 1799 Madame met for the first time, at a dinner- 
party, twenty-four-year-old Lucien Bonaparte, very 
vain, very fatuous, very susceptible, but with an 
adorable boyish smile. He fell in love with her. 
That goes without saying. Did she object to the 
infatuation ? Lucien was the First Consul's brother. 
He wrote her a most passionate, absurd, simple letter. 
The lovely Madame had a little inspiration: treated 
it as an essay in novel-writing, and handed it back 
to the devout lover in public, advising him to devote 
his talents to better things. She was only the more 
charming when she was cruel. It is hardly necessary 
to say that the distracted Lucien wrote more letters. 
He signed himself Romeo. He was dreadfully roman- 



140 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

tic and emphatic and young. Juliette got a little 
frightened, and told her husband the story. Lucien 
must be forbidden the house ! And M. Recamier, 
with the easy optimism of his character, or the lax 
morality of the time, or with shrewd business instincts 
(or with a little of all three feelings, perhaps), replied 
that he could not offend the brother of General 
Bonaparte, and that though Madame must "grant 
him nothing," she must not drive him to despair. 
Poor Lucien! He suffered himself to be made a fool 
of for a year perhaps. Before that year was over the 
First Consul himself had condescended to admire 
Madame's loveliness, and presently tried to get its 
omnipotent influence on his own side by offering her 
an appointment, which she refused, as lady-in-waiting 
to the Empress. 

M. Recamier' s bank had been getting for some time 
into a very embarrassed condition. It happened at 
last that, unless the Bank of France would advance 
a million, the Bank Recamier must stop payment. 
With Fate's fine sense of the picturesque, there was 
a great dinner-party chez Recamier the very evening 
husband and wife were waiting the decision on which 
depended their fortune — perhaps the fortune of their 
lives. The strain was too great for pleasant M. 
Recamier. He fled to the country. It was Madame 
who received the guests, exquisitely dressed and smil- 
ing — tranquilly apologising, no doubt, for Monsieur's 
absence, — listening with a like divine sympathy to the 



MADAME RECAMIER 141 

tittle-tattle of the| hour or the best talk in Paris. 
The crash fell the next day. Madame took ruin very 
pluckily. She sold her fine dresses and her jewels, 
parted with the gorgeous plate, and finally sold the 
house in the Rue du Blanc. Her philosophy was 
admirable. Yet there was that in it which forces 
one more and more into the belief that she never 
felt any misfortune deeply, and owed part of her 
courage to that insensibility. 

It is to the credit of impulsive Paris, that when 
its beauty became beauty in distress it fell at her 
feet, worshipped her, wept for her, respected her and 
loved her a thousand times more than ever. 

Madame Bernard died in 1807, "becomingly dressed" 
to the end. In the summer of the same year Madame 
Recarnier visited the de Stael at Coppet. These two 
women had for each other the attraction of opposites. 
Juliette was dowered with the beauty for which the 
de Stael longed, and the de Stael with the intellect 
Juliette must have found it so difficult to do without. 
Corinne spoke of her friend as " that beautiful person 
who has received the worship of all Europe, and who 
has never forsaken an unhappy friend;" and it is 
as she knelt, weeping, at the de StaeTs death-bed, 
that Madame Recamier first met the most powerful 
influence of her life, Chateaubriand. 

That summer at Coppet was not a little eventful. 
Prince Augustus of Prussia was among the de StaeTs 
guests, and fell straightway head over ears in love 



142 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

with Juliette's exquisite face and girlish airs of 
timidity. He was an impulsive person, this prince. 
He was not content to worship — a devotee before a 
passionless statue, who would accept the most burning 
devotion, and give in return a perfect smile and the 
touch of a marble hand. There is only one thing 
between us ! Juliette must get a divorce from her 
husband! It is characteristic of the morality of the 
time that this proposal was not taken at all as an 
insult. Juliette's cool blood had been warmed ever 
so little by the lover's ardour. " Three months passed 
away," says her partial biographer, who can see nothing 
but good in her conduct, "in the enchantments of 
a passion by which Madame Recamier was deeply 
touched, if she did not share it." His hostess was 
the prince's "eloquent advocate." At last Juliette 
asked her husband to grant her a divorce. It is 
said that the generosity of his answer moved her to 
reconsider her request, but it is not unfair to suppose 
that she was also moved by the consideration of the 
inconveniences that divorce would bring upon herself, 
and by a true Parisian's horror of living out of Paris. 
She went back there with her mind made up to stay 
with her husband, and left her prince to think "of 
a happiness which must surpass all the most delicious 
dreams of the imagination," and to "confidently ex- 
pect" she would become his wife. From Paris she 
sent him her portrait, and complacently received his 
rapturous love-letters. When she at last wrote to 



MADAME RECAMIER 143 

him plainly, the news fell upon him, he might well 
say, "like a thunderbolt." She consented to see him 
every now and then during her life — that he might 
not quite forget how to love her — and had never an 
idea for a moment that her conduct was not com- 
pletely generous and noble. 

In 1811 Madame was exiled for visiting the de 
Stael at Coppet. She travelled in Italy, saw Canova 
at Rome, and at the fall of Napoleon returned to 
Paris and started her Salon under the Bourbons. 

This Salon would appear to have differed widely 
from any of its predecessors. People did not come 
here to listen to its mistress's wit, to meet each other, 
nor — most potent of all attractions — to hear their own 
voices. They came to look at a woman's loveliness. 
Juliette sat on her throne to be worshipped. The 
dazzling complexion, the long lashes on the exquisite 
cheek, the little curls on the clear forehead, red lips, 
dimpled arms, milk-white skin — with such possessions 
as these what I need has a woman of cleverness ? The 
habitues of her rooms were her lovers. Three genera- 
tions of the Montmorencies adored her. It was Adrien 
de Montmorency who said of the impression that she 
made on her contemporaries, "they did not all die 
of it, but'' were all wounded." A lover does not want 
wit in his mistress, or only just so much wit as 
will enable her to admire his. Madame had at least 
enough cleverness to manage her Salon without any. 
There is hardly a bon mot recorded of her. If she 



144 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

had said anything it might have been the wrong thing. 
She herself suspected that, or knew it. Sometimes 
she put her handkerchief to her mouth to stop a 
burst of the most naive girlish laughter. She felt, 
indeed, with that sound and curious intuition often 
given to stupid women and rarely to stupid men, that 
beauty alone would not, in a vulgar phrase, run a 
Salon, and used hers to attract and chain to her such 
various cleverness as that of a Chateaubriand, a Ben- 
jamin Constant, a Bernadotte, and a Canova. The 
last of the Salonieres had as little in common with 
the caustic wit of a du Deffand, which brought all 
famous Paris to worship at the shrine of an old blind 
woman, as she had with the passionate sympathies of 
a Lespinasse, who had no need of beauty to make 
men love her. She was as far from the tranquil 
motherliness of a Madame GeofTrin as she was from 
the ardent conscientiousness of a Madame Necker, 
and had a prudent outward respectability entirely 
unknown to the careless lightness of a " black-locked 
d'Epinay." 

When a further reverse of fortune involved the 
loss of most of her own money as well as of M. 
Recamier's, she separated from him and went to live 
in a " cell " in the Abbaye-aux-Bois. The cell was a 
Salon at once. It was in reality only a bedchamber 
furnished with a harp, a piano, a bookcase, a portrait 
of the de Stael, and a view of Coppet by moonlight. 

It is part of the tact and delightfulness of a French 



MADAME RECAMIER 145 

woman — and perhaps of Madame Recamier above all 
French women — that she was as serene and easy here 
as in a palace. Presently she was able to take a 
larger suite of rooms in the same house, and received 
there the Duchess of Devonshire, Sir Humphry and 
Lady Davy, the Earl of Bristol, Maria Edgeworth, 
Humboldt, Miss Berry, and heard read aloud, before 
their publication, the Meditations of Lamartine. 

But the first habitut of her Salon, as well as the 
first influence of her life, was Chateaubriand. Her 
relations to this man are frankly set down by some 
people as infamous, and as hotly defended by others as 
innocent. Perhaps the truth lies between these two 
extremes. M. Chateaubriand began as a kind of ami 
de la maison ; as a worshipper of a loveliness all Paris 
worshipped too. But there does not seem much doubt 
that, in spite of the existence of a Madame Chateau- 
briand, he very soon wished to be more than Madame 
Recamier's friend. It is entirely characteristic of 
Juliette that she delightedly received letters from 
him which had all the warmth of love-letters, and 
did not find it inconsistent with her honour to be 
told " to be with you is the only good thing." " To 
be loved by you, to live in a little retreat with you 
and a few books, is the desire of my heart and the 
goal of all my wishes." In brief, Juliette loved this 
man's love — until his love demanded the sacrifice of 
outward respectability, and of the homage even a bad 
world pays to a good woman. When, like Lucien and 



146 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

Augustus, he asked proof of her affection, she drew 
back. She found it necessary to take a trip abroad. 
On her return she was able to feel that Heaven had 
" blessed her self-imposed sacrifice, and that hence- 
forward the friendship of M. Chateaubriand would be 
as she wished it . . . calm as a good conscience and 
pure as virtue." Virtue ! Well, perhaps. Madame's 
conduct may be summed up as never disreputable and 
always mean. 

During those winters in Rome she had met there 
Queen Hortense, Madame Mere, her old lover Lucien, 
and the Princess Borghese. 

When Chateaubriand was made ambassador to the 
Eternal City, he, and Madame in Paris, exchanged 
many tender letters. M. Recamier died presently at 
the Abbaye-aux-Bois, his wife's Salon being given up 
to him. Their relations were quite friendly. Madame's 
exquisite serenity was very little disturbed. It was 
part of her charm that she was always sweet, cool, and 
patient. She went to Dieppe presently, the ozone of a 
gay watering-place being then, as now, a very favourite 
and effectual panacea for the afflictions of the feminine 
soul. In 1832 she again left Paris, to escape the 
horrors of the cholera year. 

By now Madame was getting old, and failing in 
health. Her friends, Chateaubriand and Ballanche, 
were no stronger than she was. When in 1841 
she made what may be called her last great public 
appearance, at the subscription soiree she got up for 



MADAME RECAMIER 147 

the sufferers from the floods of the Rhone and Saone, 
she was sixty-four years old. 

The scene should be immortalised on canvas. Here 
was Chateaubriand doing the honours of the Salon, 
and accepted according to long custom as its host. 
Madame Rachel was acting. Garia, Rubini, and 
Lablache gave their services. Here gathered the 
wit and fashion of that Paris which, since it wor- 
shipped Juliette's girl loveliness of milk and roses, 
had been through such disasters, anarchies, triumphs, 
horrors, chaos, as are not compressed into the history 
of another city in hundreds of years. The Saloniere 
had still something of that loveliness which made men 
mad. As when one puts a hand into a jar of pot- 
pourri one sees again the rose, the garden, and the 
summer, so this woman kept to the last the divine 
fragrance of beauty. Care had scored few wrinkles on 
the face. The heat of passions had not seared it ; the 
thousand emotions, hopes, fears, tendernesses of one 
absorbing affection had not written a history in the 
eyes nor drawn pathetic lines about the mouth. 
Juliette had still her calm, sweet smile, her easy 
grace of manner. She had resigned herself to " the 
first touch of time." She was not desperately trying 
to remedy the failings of old age by art. She was 
never desperate about anything. When a friend, who 
had not seen her for a long time, complimented her on 
her looks, " Ah," she replied, " I do not deceive myself. 
From the moment I noticed the little Savoyards in the 



148 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

streets no longer turned to look at me I knew all was 
over." But to-night was a rejuvenation. It was the 
swan song of the loveliness which was this Saloniere's 
metier; it was the swan song of the Salon itself. 
After this Madame was seen in public no more. 
Chateaubriand was much with her. Her beautiful 
eyes were attacked by a cataract, and she became 
almost entirely blind. 

In 1847 Ballanche died and Madame Chateau- 
briand. Chateaubriand asked Madame Becamier to 
marry him. She refused. " Let us change nothing," 
she said, " in so perfect an affection." She was 
present at his death — still quite composed — in 1848. 
Less than a year after she died herself, of the cholera 
which she had always so greatly dreaded. Even that 
pitiless complaint left her beautiful. She lay like 
an exquisite statue, and Achille Deveria traced from 
her dead loveliness that esquisse fiddle which expresses 
" suffering and repose." 

The chief events of Madame Becamier's life have 
been noted to very little purpose if her character has 
not been seen through them. One's life is only a 
theatre to display one's nature, after all; and what 
we do, is what we are. 

Juliette of Paris was one of the women who received 
of the gods the two gifts of a perfect beauty and a 
perfect tact, which are often given in place of all else, 
and which, from a social point of view, are in them- 
selves all sufficient. 



MADAME KECAMIER 149 

They sufficed, at least, to make Madame Recamier 
the idol of her generation, " the fate of the Mont- 
morencies," and the adored of a Bernadotte, a 
Chateaubriand, a Canova, a Ballanche. There was 
such a divine sympathy in her smile, her manners, 
her beauty, that that deeper sympathy which would 
have come either from having suffered, or from having 
been capable of suffering, a like sorrow to that of 
which she was hearing, seemed hardly necessary. If 
she was a tepid mistress, she was a very gentle friend. 
There is no occasion on record in which she was not 
serene, modest, pleasing, and perfectly even in temper. 
" That which she does not like does not exist for her." 
She was constant in her friendships. Change and tem- 
pest were hateful to her. It is not a little noteworthy 
that the lives which are written of her are not lives 
of Madame Recamier, but disjointed biographies of 
Chateaubriand, Montmorency, and Ballanche. There 
is so little to say about Madame ! She wrote very 
few letters even, in that fine little hand. She had a 
kind of intellectual timidity, not a little charming — 
and safe. She seemed as if she were always saying, 
" Look at me. In that lies my strength and your 
weakness." 

As a lover, Juliette wanted the admiration of all. 
If she was ever capable of a great passion, she frittered 
away that capacity in those delightfully perilous flirta- 
tions with her princes and her authors. But that 
capacity, if it does not demand a great intellect, 



150 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

demands a great nature, a power of absorption in 
one aim, self-devotion, not seldom self-immolation. 
Madame had none of these things. 

Her morals, which a present generation is apt too 
hastily to condemn from a very vague hearsay, seem 
rather to have lived on the border of immorality than 
to have crossed it. As she was too cool for passion she 
was too prudent for sin. 

It was not unmeet that the Salon itself, as an 
institution, should die with a Recamier. It began as 
an intellectual power. When it had declined into 
a court of beauty, its end must needs have been 
near. Since the days when the Rambouillet gathered 
round her all the stars of the intellectual firmament, 
and lit her rooms with the spiritual fire of a Fenelon 
and the flaming eloquence of a Bossuet, it had indeed 
passed through a hundred changes. It had nourished 
in its breast the Free Thought which, put into action, 
was to emancipate men's bodies from the misery and 
oppression of a thousand years, and their minds from 
a hundred priestly delusions. It had been alternately 
a school of wit and an arena for the discussion of the 
deepest problems of the soul — fate, freewill, death, 
eternity. It had brought to birth more Ion mots, 
epigrams, madrigals, fantasias, than had been produced 
by any other society at any other time. Under its 
fostering care a little shoot of an Encyclopaedia grew 
into a tree whose branches reached to all lands. It 
was a playground for the light loves of a d'Houdetot, 



MADAME RECAMIER 151 

a Saint-Lambert, a d'fipinay, a Mademoiselle d'Ette. 
It encouraged the virile vigour of a de Stael and the 
brilliant timidity of a d'Alembert. No social function 
in history can boast members a hundredth part as 
distinguished. Not content with a Rousseau and a 
Voltaire, a Diderot and a Duclos, it attracted from other 
nations a Grimm and a Holbach, a Hume, a Gibbon, 
and a Walpole. 

That it polished manners and brought to an ex- 
quisite refinement the courtesies and little social 
tendernesses of daily life, was not perhaps much, but 
it was something. 

It gave an extraordinary impetus to book-writing. 
It flooded the world with memoirs which are become 
history. It produced some of the best letters ever 
written. It was the direct origin of innumerable 
poems. It inspired masterpieces and corrected them. 
Its effect on the Encyclopedia alone would have 
made it a literary influence without rival in the 
history of the world. 

But it was as a moral anomaly that it was most 
remarkable. Here men and women, " whose chief 
ambition it was to excel in corruption and to be 
fancifully original in sin," were the first to discuss 
that purer morality and generous philanthropy which 
are the boast of the world to-day. The rights of 
men were first realised by the people who most trod 
them under foot. The Revolution was brought about 
by the class whom it first turned and rent. 



152 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS 

The uses of the Salon are over, and so the Salon 
itself is no more. 

It is not a good man who lies dead. It is rather 
a bad man who has wrought much good. It were 
unjust to remember that his morals were the morals 
of his age, and to forget that he originated ideas far 
in advance of it. So to this brilliant talker, with his 
light life and fruitful thought, be peace. 




— £/ - V/rv/////// . 



Tronch d 
i day a wider influence 
q than h 
,1, Dider 
His fame - was not French, but European. Aim 
the monarchs of the Continent were at some time 
or another his patients. He was the most enlightened 
medical man of the eighteenth century. He was all 
his life long fighting the ignorance and prejudice, 
almost universal at that date in his profession, He 
popularised innoculation in France. He flung open 
udows in Ye poor, stifling, mori- 

enjoy at 



bin, the good 



ician. 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

As there are some celebrities whom posterity honours 
unnecessarily, there are others whom it unduly forgets. 
Of these last is the Doctor Tronchin. Yet Tronchin 
had in his own day a wider influence and a more 
dazzling renown than his_ friends and contemporaries, 
Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Grimm, and d'Alembert. 
His fame was not French, but European. Almost all 
the monarchs of the Continent were at some time 
or another his patients. He was the most enlightened 
medical man of the eighteenth century. He was all 
his life long fighting the ignorance and prejudice, 
almost universal at that date in his profession. He 
popularised innoculation in France. He flung open 
the windows in Versailles and let poor, stifling, mori- 
bund royalty enjoy at least the free air of heaven. 
He was a practical influence upon thousands who 
were unmoved by Jean Jacques' "passionate appeals 
to mothers " and to the great Mother Nature from 
whom the Doctor learned almost all his art. Deeply 
religious in an age of scoffers ; austere to himself 
and tender to others ; the gentlest of all stoics ; wise, 
firm, strong, beneficent — such was Tronchin, the good 
physician. 

153 



154 TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

He was born in Geneva in 1709. The atmosphere 
of his childhood was narrow, peaceful, puritanical. 
There must very early have been inculcated into 
the boy the principles which ruled the man, a strict 
devotion to duty, plain living, high thinking, and the 
noblest of all ambitions — u to find one's right work 
and to do it." 

Theodore was still very young when his father, 
a rich banker, was ruined. But the loss of fortune 
is not always a misfortune, as every one knows. The 
boy was sent to England to be near a relative of 
his mother's — St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. My lord 
was in disgrace, so he had no place or favour to 
give away. But he had something better, for he 
directed Theodore's studies at the university — the 
boy went through the usual course at Cambridge — 
and introduced him to some of the most learned 
men of the age. Rather a serious nature had this 
Swiss undergraduate, it appears, beneath those charm- 
ing and sympathetic manners which made him 
such a delightful companion hereafter. He had a 
very handsome face too, this " Apollo Tronchin " of 
the letters of Voltaire; so perhaps it was the easier 
for his fellows to forgive him that he was from the 
first a close student, and already devoted to that 
art to which he was to impart so splendid a lustre. 
Did he meet in England by any chance, one wonders, 
that coarse, kindly old fire-eater my Lady Mary 
Wortley Montagu, who had lately brought from the 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 155 

East a strange custom, highly disapproved by medical 
big- wigs, called innoculation ? If the two never met, 
it was in England that the boy first heard of and 
studied that remedy. It needed an honest doctor, 
to be sure, to see the good points of a preventive 
of so " profitable a distemper" as the smallpox, and 
a brave man to push it in the teeth of learned 
opposition, to fight for it, single-handed, through 
patient, zealous years, against ignorance, contempt, 
ridicule, and that wilful blindness there is no en- 
lightening, and to benefit the world in spite of 
itself, at last. 

Theodore Tronchin began most likely that crusade 
at Cambridge — a penniless boy with all knowledge 
and experience against him, with nothing to depend 
on but his own brains, his own honour, and his own 
indomitable will. It was at Cambridge he first read 
Boerhaave, the great Dutch physician, who was 
responsible for the saying that it would have been 
better for the world if there had never been any 
doctors at all. The boy Tronchin had a passion 
for the man's writings, and then to be near him 
and study under him. He went to Leyden, and 
flung himself heart and soul into his art. He learned 
at the feet of Boerhaave all that Boerhaave could 
teach him. When it reached his ears that the 
master had said that M. Tronchin — handsome, boyish, 
Apollo Tronchin — devoted too much time to doing 
his hair, Apollo cut it all off, and appeared cropped 



156 TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

at the schools the next morning. He had at least 
one great presage of success — a single - minded 
devotion to his aim. He must have been, too, 
something better than a parrot learner, since at three- 
and-twenty he was practising as a physician in Am- 
sterdam, with an ever-growing renown, only second 
to that of the great Boerhaave himself. 

What was the secret by which this boy inspired 
confidence in every patient he attended ? He was 
completely at variance with all the medical science 
of his age. No black draughts, blisterings, bleedings, 
drugs, and stuffiness for him. Fresh air, exercise, 
temperance — these were the heresies he preached. 
Forswear sack and live cleanly. Obey natural laws 
and you won't want to call in Us, with our pompous 
formulas and precedents, and our dear old time- 
honoured prejudices, which make medicine in this 
my day " the scourge of the human race." What 
wonder if this daring youth had already half the 
medical colleges in Europe about his ears ? But 
Amsterdam made him inspector of its hospitals, and 
the Stadtholder would fain have had him as his first 
physician; and presently he was president of the 
city's medical schools. When he went back to Geneva 
in 1750, the Anabaptists of Amsterdam offered him 
15,000 florins to return to them. He had been so 
unwearying, so clever, so kind, so honest ! In that 
last word lay the crux of the matter, perhaps. Pro- 
fessional honesty was at a low ebb in this eighteenth 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 157 

century, it must be confessed, and Tronchin rose to 
fame less because lie knew so much, than because he 
was ready to confess he knew so little. 

He carried on the same crusade in Geneva against 
the ignorance, prejudice, and hardness of heart which 
were degrading the noblest of all arts. He was never 
weary of insisting to his pupils on its splendour and 
dignity. He was always working for the health — 
moral as well as physical — of that poor little republic, 
rich only in virtues, which was all his life bound to 
his heart by strong chains. One likes to fancy him, 
like a Greater Physician, going about doing good. 
He set apart a certain time every day that he might 
see the poor and prescribe for them — free ; and on 
a little table at his side there was a bag of money 
out of which he provided the means for the necessaries 
he recommended. A light of beneficence seems to 
shine always from that handsome, youthful face. 
Fame and applause began to reach him from afar 
off, and did not disturb its serenity. All the time 
he was fighting steadily, unswervingly, for that little 
Benjamin of his soul, innoculation, and the cries of 
" Quack ! Knave ! Innovator ! " did not move him 
either. He was married by this time — not happily, 
it is said. But if there was some wound in his own 
soul, it only served to make him the more tender 
to the wounds of others ; and his own sorrows, 
which he bore in a noble silence all his life, only 
prompted him to be the more earnest and the 



158 TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

more set to relieve, if that might be, the sorrows of 
the world. 

In due time he innoculated his own children. Then 
a few more converts came to him, and yet a few more, 
and more. In 1756 he was called to Paris to inno- 
culate the Due de Chartres and Mademoiselle de 
Montpensier, the children of the Duke of Orleans; 
and M. Tronchin and his innoculation became a furore, 
and the mode. 

There are many sudden changes in the history of 
Parisian popular feeling, but hardly one so sudden 
and complete as this one. Instead of the most 
monstrous humbug and impostor, M. Tronchin was 
the saviour of his people, the one great benefactor 
of the race. Fashionable Paris nocked to him to a 
man. The street where his house stood was so 
blocked with fine carriages that all traffic was im- 
peded. From having shuddered with horror at a 
quackery that would upset a dear old time-honoured 
institution like the smallpox, people would now have 
been innoculated three times a week if they could. 
The wit and beauty of the capital jostled each other 
in the great doctor's waiting-rooms. In the clubs 
one forgot Port Mahon, Minorca, the English, and 
talked Tronchin instead. The Duke of Orleans had 
given him ten thousand Sens, to say nothing of jewels 
and gold, and he was already appointed physician to 
the Children of France. An enterprising milliner 
invented a bonnet a V innoculation, daintily trimmed 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 159 

with ribbons on which a sewing of peas imitated the 
spots of that fallen monster, la 'petite virole. There 
was a Tronchin vinegar, whose healing properties, said 
the tradesman who sold it, were so great that it 
was not only useful, but necessary to carry about 
a little bottle of it on the person, in order that you 
might be able to rub it frequently on your hands 
and temples, and to enhale it. There was scarcely 
a gallant at court who had not come to be Tronchined. 
All the migraines and vapcurs of the capital flocked 
to touch the healing garments of this virtue and be 
saved. M. Tronchin was also enabled — and in spite, 
too, of the solemn faculty which surrounded them — 
to persuade dukes and princesses that even royalty 
cannot live healthily without some sort of ventilation, 
and a little occasional attention to the primary rules 
of sanitation. How his brethren must have hated, 
and did hate, a man not yet fifty years old who had 
effected changes so radical, and was about to effect 
others more radical still : who wrote with a dreadful 
clearness to the Doctor Boyer of Paris : " I know, and 
you know, that all our learning and study has not 
done away with those infamous persons in our pro- 
fession, who every day and all day sacrifice to con- 
ventionality and prejudice the divine art which they 
dishonour : " and whose ridiculous obstinate notion 
" Prevention is better than cure " was certain to fatally 
undermine many very comfortable little fortunes in 
the faculty. 



160 TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

Alike through hatred and adulation M. Tronchin 
remained as he had always been, cool in judgment, 
fixed in purpose, wise, beneficent, and serene. He 
had done what the world would call much. But 
there was so much more to do ! Paris used all her 
charms — they were not few in these latter days of 
the old regime — to keep him with her. She laid 
money, honour, rank at his feet, and he would have 
none of them. In his mind had long been another 
design, by which he would work more good, gain 
wider influence, and bring into mode principles which 
should work for the happiness of the race when 
innoculation had long been superseded by greater 
discovery than Tronchin would live to see. He re- 
turned to Geneva. He established there what would 
now be called a " cure," and began to exercise upon 
the habits and hygiene of women an influence far 
greater than Rousseau's. 

It was no doubt at first M. Tronchin' s delightful 
personality which attracted to the little, dull Swiss 
republic the butterflies of Paris, with physical ailments, 
real or imaginary, moral ailments only too certain, 
weak, witty, charming — the natural product of that 
supremely clever and silly age, the eighteenth century. 
Many of them had seen him in the capital. This 
dear doctor, with his sympathetic manner, his hand- 
some face, his perfect understanding of one's symptoms 
and constitution ! M. Tronchin, indeed, understood 
his patients much more perfectly than they supposed. 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 161 

The hotels of Balances and de Secheron in Geneva were 
soon filled with them ; they overflowed into villas on the 
banks of the lake. " An ever-changing and renewing 
crowd of invalids, exclusively belonging to the French 
aristocracy," formed a unique and enormous clientele. 
Here was the Duchesse d'Anville, " the philosophic 
duchess ; " the beautiful Madame de Vermenou, " the 
image of Minerva," who solaced her illnesses with the 
society of many admirers, and was accompanied by 
the intense Mademoiselle Curchod — the future Madame 
Necker — whose diseases were always of the soul more 
than of the body. Here was Madame d'fipinay, the 
most graceful of all sinners, one of the especial " de- 
votes du reverend Pere Tronchin," the friend of Rous- 
seau, and the mistress of Grimm. Madame Denis 
came over very often from Uncle Voltaire's at Ferney, 
for Madame Denis was a gourmande, and constantly 
in need of the temperate counsels of M. Tronchin. 
Here was Madame d'Albertas, " laide et coquette" the 
wife of the President of the Grande Chambre of Aix- 
en-Provence. Here was the Marquise de Muy — " a 
very little soul," wrote the doctor, " enclosed in a very 
little body naturally feeble, and much debilitated by 
remedies." Here, too, came a rheumatic, dissipated 
duke or two, and the nephew and niece of the Cardinal 
de Tencin, that their only son might be innoculated. 
But the chief part of the crowd was made up of the 
pretty feminine vice of Paris, whose worst disease 
was sin, whose universal disease was folly, and who 



162 TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

found themselves, for the first time in their lives, 
for the most part, under the influence of a good 
man. 

One understands the full extent of the great Doctor's 
tact and cleverness, supreme strength of will, and 
steady uprightness, when one reflects on the unpalat- 
able nature of the truths which he enforced. 

He preached Nature to the most artificial class of 
the most artificial people in the most artificial period 
of the history of the world. What is the matter with 
me, Doctor ? Your life, Madame. Your card parties 
till three o'clock in the morning, your never-ending 
routs, balls, and masquerades — the stifling atmosphere 
of your houses, your vanity, your self-indulgence, your 
idleness. And what will you give me to cure me ? 
Nothing, Madame. Fling aside the drugs and the 
drops, the pills and the potions, which you have 
been offering outraged Nature to appease her. Wash 
the paint off your face, throw away the ridiculous 
structure on your head, and the absurd hoops and 
wires which make movement an exertion and exercise 
an impossibility. Get up early, go out of doors, walk, 
live simply, read a little, even think a little if you 
can. What is the world better for a simpering doll, 
with a little shallow wit as her finest attribute, with- 
out the most rudimentary sense of duty or a single 
quality which can make men respect her ? You have, 
and will have for ever, the noblest of all missions in 
life — but only one mission — to be a good wife and 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 163 

mother. Not all the mincing frivolities of your day, 
nor the shrieking fanaticism of those (so-called) strong- 
minded sisters who will come after you, can alter that 
fact. You have the one great mission — and you have 
failed in it. 

It was, no doubt, Tronchin's supreme glory that 
he brought back the mothers to the babies they had 
neglected, made them nurse their own children, and 
at least not ruin the race in its beginnings. The 
splendid scoundrel who wrote "£mile" was still 
polishing his wonderful periods in his " Hermitage." 
When the book appeared in 1762, Tronchin, the 
good physician, and the helpful helplessness of those 
powerful agents of his, the babies themselves, had 
accomplished their aim. Rousseau might have shouted 
his loudest, and not a woman would have heeded him, 
if the great Doctor had not already done his best. 

One can fancy the life at Geneva. The mondaines 
of Paris began to meet each other out walking in 
the mornings in the most absurd, comfortable, walk- 
able shoes one can imagine, carrying long canes, and 
wearing the light, short skirts called Tronchines, in 
which it was evidently possible to do something more 
energetic than sit about and feel beautiful. There 
were not any routs and balls here — so one could not 
go to them. Geneva was dull — horribly, impossibly 
dull. But were dulness and peace a little akin after 
all ? There was the lion of Ferney, certainly, to go 
and peep at, by way of recreation. There were also 



164 TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

modest — very modest — little tea-parties a V Anglaise. 
And when M. Tronchin — M. Tronchin was quite 
clever enough to know the importance of the day 
of small things — perceived one was getting really too 
bored, he would invite one to supper, and Voltaire's- 
" dear ^Esculapius " might be seen en famille playing 
whist very badly, and supposing himself to be playing 
it very well. The illustrious visitors also amused 
themselves by commenting freely on the ill- temper 
and laidcur of Madame Tronchin, and of her husband's 
invincible goodness and patience towards her. " Et 
que fait Madame Tronchin ? " said some one to the 
sprightly Madame Cramer. " Elle fait peur," was the 
answer. 

Grimm came here to edit his Correspondance Lit- 
teraire, with the help of Madame d'fipinay, and to 
admire the wise, firm counsels of her physician. The 
Empress would fain have had the Doctor with her 
in Russia; and to Voltaire, who had aptly described 
himself as toujours allant et souffrant, Tronchin was a 
necessity. 

There is no higher testimony to the Doctor's char- 
acter, than his friendship with the patriarch of 
Ferney. 

Is it possible that the great Voltaire was half afraid 
of the great Doctor ? The diagnosis of M. Tronchin 
was so sure and penetrating, that he found out the 
sicknesses of the soul as well as the diseases of the 
body. The Prince of Sceptics would fain have had 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 165 

M. Tronchin, with his deeply religious mind, believe 
that he too was almost persuaded to be a Christian. 
The Doctor listened without a word. He hated re- 
ligious discussion, which always led, he said, to the 
profit of irreligion. And besides, he knew M. de 
Voltaire — to the core. When Geneva was flooded 
with blasphemous pamphlets, which the patriarch 
disavowed, he disavowed them louder than ever to 
his dear iEsculapius. Cannot one fancy the little, 
lean, withered cynic having a very bad quarter of an 
hour with the only man in the world who never lied 
to him nor flattered him, after the publication of that 
infamous " Pucelle " ? 

When a theatrical company of evil reputation would 
have established a theatre in the immediate neigh- 
bourhood of Geneva, Tronchin fought Voltaire tooth 
and nail for the morals and honour of his little re- 
public — and won. This man never cringed. The 
greatness of the great was nothing to him. " I had 
always spoken the truth to him," he says simply of 
Voltaire. There is no record that that truth-telling 
offended any one of his illustrious patients. The path 
of duty was then, as now, the surest way to glory. 

In 1766 M. Tronchin came to Paris as perpetual 
physician to the Duke of Orleans, and remained there 
for ten years. It was alike the height of his power 
and his fame. He used the influence he had obtained 
with an unwearied persistence. He recommended the 
fine ladies to polish their own floors, and the Court 



166 TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

gallants to chop wood. The renewed charges of 
quackery only made him smile. The quackery was 
in the loathsome nostrums of the Pharmacopoeia, and 
not in a little honest work; and the common-sense 
of the laity had begun to find that out for itself. 
There must indeed have been then, as there are now, 
many patients who continued to suppose the more 
numerous the medicine bottles, the better the doctor ; 
and others who would seem to have believed that a 
healing virtue lay in the physician feeling the patient's 
pulse and looking at his tongue, and that to obey 
orders was altogether a work of supererogation. 

It was during these ten years that M. Tronchin 
freed the children from the " swaddling bands which 
deformed their bodies and ruined their health," and, 
never too busy or too professional to be abun- 
dantly compassionate, substituted innoculation vesica- 
toires for the incision which was at once painful 
and alarming to the baby patients. That famous 
Correspondance LitUraire contains a hundred allu- 
sions to his work at this period. Now it was an 
operation, hitherto unattempted, he had performed 
on a monkish patient for the relief of acute nervous 
pains in the head. Another day a grateful sufferer 
burst into poetry on the complete, and completely 
drugless, cure M. Tronchin had made of his case. 
Madame d'fipinay, whom the Doctor was now attend- 
ing in Paris, spoke gratefully, poor soul ! as well 
she might, of mon sauveur and of opium as " this 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 167 

charming remedy." Galiani alludes to the iced 
sponges Tronchin recommended for blood - spitting. 
It was the Doctor himself who wrote to a patient 
this memorable sentence, " M'est il permis, Monsieur, 
de vous le dire ? One must dare to do nothing. 
Men, and doctors above all men, fear less to make 
victims than to be suspected of ignorance. I repeat 
to you, fear the physicians more than the disease." 

In 1778 Voltaire arrived on his last visit to Paris, 
and called in his old friend and adviser. Tronchin' s 
counsels had lost nothing in wisdom and firmness. 
" Go back to Ferney," he said. " Your Marquis de 
Villette and your Madame Denis, with their interested 
advice that you should remain here, are nothing to 
me. Go back. The noise and flattery of this Paris 
will kill you. Go back while you can." The patri- 
arch was continually bursting into tears, promising 
to go, and not going. The sequel every one knows. 
The great Doctor, full of pity, was at this death- 
bed, as at so many others. " I saw Voltaire sicken 
and die," he says, " and marked the difference between 
the serenity of the soul of a dying sage and the 
frightful torment of him to whom death is the King 
of Terrors." " La rage s'est emparee de son ame. 
Rapellez vous les fureurs d'Oreste." One is re- 
minded of that saeva indignatio of a greater than 
Voltaire. 

Another death-bed was even now preparing. Full 
of years and honour, having found his work and done 



168 TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 

it, having brought infinite blessing to the race, greatly 
comforted sorrow, helped the helpless, strengthened 
the feeble, sustained the dying, M. Tronchin himself 
went the way of all flesh. His death was but the 
consequence of his life. What terror could that King 
of Terrors of whom he had spoken have for a man, 
who, the greatest anatomist of his day, had believed 
firmly in the divine origin and resurrection of the 
body — feeble and sin-stricken, no doubt, but so evi- 
dently and exquisitely adapted by a Master Hand in 
every function for the work it has to do ? The fact 
that the innocent suffer, and will suffer, nameless 
diseases and horrors for the sins of the guilty, had 
not affected this man's faith in the perfect goodness 
of God ; and that he had seen in his long life and 
shameful eighteenth century more of such sin and 
horror than the modern medical student who, from 
a brief hospital experience, can find no place for a 
Deity in the scheme of things, need not be doubted. 

Tronchin died. There was hardly a celebrated man 
of his day who did not lift up his voice over that 
grave to honour it. But his true glory lies, not in 
" Portraits " and eulogies ; not even in the tardy recog- 
nition of the faculty who fought him. The most ordi- 
nary practitioner of to-day knows a thousand things 
undreamt of in Tronchin's philosophy. The new truths 
he battled for against the world are but the alphabet 
of modern medicine. Who would have welcomed so 
eagerly as that generous and open soul the marvellous 



TRONCHIN: A GREAT DOCTOR 169 

advance in surgery and sick-nursing ; the use of anaes- 
thetics, a new faculty the most honest and enlightened 
the world has seen ; the vaccination which has made 
his innoculation but a dead page of history ? 

Yet the sane, strong, and healthy of the race to-day 
may well pay the passing tribute of a thought to the 
man who, in the time of their by no means distant 
ancestry, made temperance and decent living the mode, 
and to be a good mother a European fashion. 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

In 1750, when the Pompadour ruled France through 
its doddering king, and a certain ex-clerk called Clive 
had begun to expel the French from India and to lay 
the foundations of a vaster than any French Empire, 
there was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, a baby girl 
named Maria Letizia Ramolino. 

Corsica was then much as it is now, the engaging 
ne'er-do-weel of the island family, always brave, pic- 
turesque, and delightful, entirely unreliable and no- 
body's enemy but its own; the handsome boy with 
whom all the powers coquetted, and whom in turn 
Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Greeks, 
Goths, Saracens, and Genoese loved and left. 

In 1750 it was Italian. The little Letizia spoke a 
degenerate Italian as soon as she could speak anything, 
and spoke it as her mother-tongue to the end of her 
days. She came of a good family, though to come of 
a good family in a barbarous island two hundred years 
ago did not necessarily imply any very high degree of 
culture or refinement. Her father died when she 
was very young. She was brought up by her mother 
exactly as little Corsican girls always were — book- 
learning dangerous and unnecessary, the art of reading 

170 




'aMca~ 3-£t?e/zt<*M../2/T~ *<■ 



, y/tt <yM^£Ae^#/^/l<i/>r/<< 



, THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 171 

itself a suspicious accomplishment, and writing admir- 
able for signing one's name. But she was taught too, 
very early indeed, household " order, economy, the good 
direction of affairs," the whole art of marketing, and 
the practical arithmetic by which one makes a single 
greasy lira do the work of two. 

One can picture the serious infant Mademoiselle 
Ramolino — very pretty and good — going market wards, 
or to say her little prayers in the dark church hard by, 
through that Place which is to bear her name, past the 
white house where she is to live her young wifehood, 
and give a great man to the world. She was but a 
small creature when her mother, Madame Ramolino, 
married again and became Madame Fesch. When 
other little girls are playing with dolls, this one was 
gravely mothering a baby half-brother named Joseph. 
When other children are children still, blithe and care- 
less, and with a child's gay thoughtlessness for the 
morrow, Mademoiselle Letizia, aged thirteen, was ac- 
counted marriageable and being briefly wooed. 

Did Charles Bonaparte fall in love with a sweet, 
girlish face, innocent eyes, dark curls, grave mouth ? 
He might well have done so. He was himself 
eighteen, "doux, insouciant, ddpenseur" very little money, 
a lovely talent for verse making, and only a couple 
of stupid old uncles to raise objections to a prema- 
ture engagement. While for Mademoiselle — Perhaps 
Madame Fesch, after the custom of those times, 
said, " Here is the man you are to marry ; marry 



172 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

him." To an older Letizia, one knows, duty was the 
master motive of life, and obedience to rightful autho- 
rity a religion. But one would rather think, as one 
may well think, that in this case a girl fell in love 
girlishly with M. Charles' handsome face, brave air, 
and light heart, or that a motherly little person per- 
ceived that the lover wanted taking care of, and took 
care of him. 

"Je me mariai a l'age de treize ans avec Charles 
Bonaparte qui etait un bel homme, grand comme 
Murat." It was an old woman at Rome who re- 
called the husband of her youth — who forgot, perhaps, 
as she dictated these Souvenirs, danger, sorrow, diffi- 
culty, the great rising and the great falling which 
separated the present from the past — and was again 
for the moment the child Letizia, beginning the world. 

The young couple at first settled — if such a word 
can be applied to any of their doings — in the white 
house at Ajaccio. The wife must have been at the 
most fifteen — Heaven help her ! — when she knew the 
troubles of maternity without its joys and, herself 
a child, held a dead child on her breast. There is 
a little bust in marble by Chaudet of the Signora 
Bonaparte which must have been modelled in the 
early days of this early marriage. It represents a 
very sweet, thoughtful face, with hair curling on 
the forehead and the dress open at the throat to 
show a girlish neck. Is it only imagination that 
makes one trace in the lines of the serious mouth 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 173 

and the tender gravity of the expression the sad 
little history of those two or three first babies, who 
died babies, of the childish wife who had so soon 
to be wise and prudent because the husband was so 
easy-going, debonnaire, and careless ? It was Madame 
— even a Madame of " treize ans " — who was always the 
better man of the two. She knew it because she 
must have known it. There is hardly a nobler trait 
in a noble character than the fidelity with which she 
hid it from the world and obeyed, loved, reverenced 
the man she had married: 

In the winter of 1767 he took her to Corte, the 
impregnable, dauntless little city founded on a rock, 
and there at the house of his uncle, General Cazanova, 
was born little Joseph, living and likely to live. In 
such a nature as Letizia's the tenderness with which 
she bent over her vigorous son was not without care 
for the morrow, and grave thought of how he was 
to be provided for and brought up. Corsica was dis- 
turbed as usual — or more disturbed than usual — 
which is saying a great deal. Genoa had just handed 
it over to France ; and Corsica, objecting to the 
transaction, was fain to fight France under Paoli 
and make herself independent. Yet perhaps the 
quietest days of Letizia's whole life — the only quiet 
days in it one might almost say — were those she 
spent at Millelli, the Bonaparte " garden of olives " 
near Ajaccio, with her baby, for her convalescence, 
while Charles was paying a flying visit to Rome, and 



174 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

over Corsica was the calm that comes before the 
storm. 

The treaty by which the island became French 
was finally signed in the August of 1768. It might 
have been expected that the impulsive Charles, who 
was brave enough to make any woman love him, 
should throw in his lot with Paoli and be ready to 
fight for an inspiring leader and a free country, to 
the death. But there is only one woman in a thou- 
sand who can be a patriot when patriotism asks of 
her domestic peace, a husband and a child. Letizia 
was that woman. She was herself of that wild and 
picturesque company who, mounted on the little 
rough horses native to Corsica, came to Paoli at 
Corte and offered him their services and their lives. 
If with some it was the impetuous courage of the 
moment, it was not so with her. All her life she 
counted the cost of the tower she would build — 
and built it. She foresaw with a fatal clearness to 
what private ruin public spirit would lead — and did 
her duty. 

She followed her husband through the first cam- 
paign. At the fatal battle of Ponte-Nuovo, when 
Paoli's troops were entirely routed by the French, 
this girl, with her child in her arms, encouraged 
her ruined countrymen with her own courage and 
enthusiasm. After that disastrous day, when only 
flight was left them, the young husband and wife, 
with little Joseph, fled for shelter to the caves 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 175 

and rocks of the great frowning Monte Rotondo. 
Letizia already had the hope — if under such circum- 
stances it could be called a hope — of being again a 
mother. What must she not have suffered ? The 
hostile French were surrounding them ; Corsica was 
ruined ; in the wretched villages through which they 
passed the ominous silence was broken only by the 
heart-rending voceri and lamentations of the Corsican 
women. On the back of a mule this girl of eighteen 
went through the fordless rivers and the sweet dense 
macquis, or undergrowth "which covers the country, 
with her baby in her arms and the boy husband 
for sole guide and protector. " I had no other 
thought," she said long after, " but of his danger 
and that of Corsica." He was always loving and 
devoted ; but it was upon her own soul, and upon 
her own soul only, that she relied. 

It was at her instigation, at her passionate wish, 
that he left her in the midst of danger and ill in 
health, to see the ruined Paoli set sail for Leghorn. 
When he returned, something of her history and 
courage had reached the ears and stirred the gen- 
erosity of the French, and they offered the little party 
the first advantage of armistice and a safe passage 
to their home in Ajaccio. 

With what an infinite sense of relief that young 
couple, travel-stained and footsore, must have gained 
that quiet white house, with its dull, cool rooms, 
after the burning midsummer heat and the fever 



176 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

of danger and difficulty without ! Their relations, 
after the fashion of the time and the country, 
gathered about them. Here came Uncle Archdeacon 
Fesch, Monsieur and Madame Fesch and their son 
Joseph, now six years old, as well as Madame 
Bonaparte, the mother of Charles. In the midst 
of them Letizia moved about her daily duties — a 
very notable housewife, a very wise mother, a beauti- 
ful woman who never thought of her beauty, a girl 
who did not expect to amuse herself, and who scarcely 
ever left the house except to go to the church hard 
by. She crept there very often, it seems, on these 
sultry summer days. If her child may but be born 
alive and strong, every daughter she has shall be 
called Marie and " vowed to the Virgin ! " What a 
simple prayer it was, and from what a wise and 
simple heart it came ! It is hard now to realise 
that there was then no premonition of the child's 
greatness in her mind, that she was only a Corsican 
girl, praying that in spite of fate, which had been 
cruel, she might be again the joyful mother of a 
living son. 

On the feast of the Assumption she was brought 
hurriedly home from church, and in the morning 
of that August day, 1769, Napoleon was born. It 
is one of the great days of history. The little pallet 
bed, the narrow room, the white house itself, have 
become relics, sacred to hundreds of pilgrims of all 
nations. The escritoire where Madame wrote (a very 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 177 

little), the harpsichord where she played, her sweet- 
faced picture on the wall, are now, for the sake of 
the child born that day, vertu almost priceless. But 
to Letizia he was but a baby whom she must love 
the more indeed because she had so suffered for 
him, who must be brought up righteously, and not 
allowed to be peevish because he was so frail. She 
nursed him herself — with the nourrice, Camilla Ilari, 
to help her when need be. His grandmother wanted 
to spoil him. Charles would laugh at his baby 
tempers. The Mammucia- Camilla indulged him after 
the fashion of her kind. Only the mother wanted 
his good more than his pleasure, looked with those 
lovely serious eyes to a future when he would thank 
her that she had been firm, just, consistent ; treated 
him not as a plaything to nestle and caress, but as 
a man-child — gotten from the Lord. 

Before Napoleon — the Nabulionello of the circle 
at home — was two, he had a little sister who died. 
Lucien, Elisa, and Louis were born in quick succession. 
The Bonapartes were poor enough, and getting poorer. 
Charles would seem to have been the kind of man who 
was always having his own and his wife's portraits 
painted and making pretty offerings to her heaux ycux, 
while he lacked the means almost to pay for the 
necessaries of life, and considered the future of his 
young family scarcely at all. It was Letizia who 
did that. With what a grave face she must have 
watched those babies playing in the garden at Millelli ' 

M 



178 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

They had no one to depend on but herself. She 
taught them to the best of her ability — Corsican 
history and legend, love your country and fear your 
God — a brief education but not a bad one. She 
saved for them, pinched for them, for them grew 
into those frugal habits on which was founded later 
the charge of avarice. It is the only one her bitterest 
enemies have been able to bring against her character. 

When Louis was a baby, little Napoleon, with his 
elder brother, Joseph, went to school at Autun. 
Whatever that parting cost the mother she showed 
nothing. Before they started she took the nine-year- 
old Napoleon to the "Peres Lazaristes " of Ajaccio 
and prayed their blessing for him. It was the 
Mammucia Camilla and the bonne Saveria who 
lamented and wept. There were no tears in the 
mother's eyes. She would have her boys be men 
— strong to do their duty. It is Napoleon who 
speaks long after of her " severe tenderness," and 
who says that he owed to her motherhood " all my 
fortune and whatever good I have done." She ex- 
horted the little sons to courage — to courage ! What 
need she must have had of it herself when the white 
sails of the retreating boat were like a gull on the 
blue Ajaccian bay and she turned home to work 
and care with the tears " the lids deny falling dreary 
on her heart " ! 

In 1780 she had a little daughter — " Paulette 
bien aimee." Directly she was well enough she took 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 179 

Lucien to Autun, to replace Napoleon who had been 
promoted to Brienne. She found the Nabulionello 
of childish days very thin and working like grim 
death, while he — " My mother was then nine-and- 
twenty," he says, " and belle comme les amours. " Hers 
must have been, partly at least, the beauty of the 
soul, which trouble enhances rather than impairs, 
for at home the poverty was crueller than ever. 
Things looked for a while a little brighter when 
the eldest little girl, Elisa, got a presentation to 
St. Cyr. But in 1782 "there was a new baby — 
Caroline — to think of, and in 1784 another little 
son — Jerome — and Charles sick unto death. 

If the husband of her youth had not been the 
support and refuge he might have been, womanlike, 
Letizia had not loved him the less for that. He 
died away from her at Montpellier, tenderly cared 
for by friends, in the arms of his eldest, and with 
the name of his greater son on his lips, and his 
last thought for the wife he left to such dark 
days. 

" At thirty-two," Madame says simply in those 
Souvenirs, H I was left a widow." She had neither 
time nor wealth for the luxury of grief. Strong, 
stern, and dutiful, she had at once to set to work 
to educate her babies and economise a hundred 
times more painfully than ever. It is said that 
at this time she lost some of the soft and fragrant 
charm which had marked her girlish loveliness. 



180 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

What wonder ? She had to fight the world for 
her children ; for them to be alert, keen, active, 
shrewd. A French writer speaks of her expression 
of " surprising intensity " in her picture which still 
hangs in the white house at Ajaccio. That was 
the portrait of a girl — comparatively untouched by 
sorrow. It is of the Madame Mere of these early 
days of widowhood that Napoleon speaks when he 
says, " an excellent woman, an unequalled mother 
— with a courage and strength of soul above 
humanity." 

He came back to her for a holiday in 1786, a 
year after his father's death, sick in mind and 
body, morose, despondent, bitter. They were all 
so deadly poor ! What hope was there in the 
world for all these helpless creatures, forgotten in 
their barbarous island, and with the France which 
had conquered them, itself going laughing to ruin ? 
Madame took Napoleon to Millelli. There, in that 
olive garden, under the shadow of the old oak 
tree, she would sit with him, talk to him, cheer 
him by the hour together. Times would not always 
be bad. There was my uncle, the Archdiacre, who 
would live with them and help them as far as in 
him lay. The State, too, had remembered them in 
the form of a very, very little pension. And over 
all was the good God. 

Letizia had no learning, but a great wisdom. She 
was not prolific of caresses. Her love was in deeds, 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 181 

not words. She won her boy back to health and 
hope, made him face the world again, with that 
splendid courage which was her own only armour 
against fate, and inspired in him that passionate 
reverence and affection for her character which 
only died with his death. It was this episode in 
his life which must have been before his mind 
when, at St. Helena, having thanked the doctor 
Antommarchi for his goodness to him, he added, 
" ' But all that is not maternal solicitude. Ah ! 
mam an Letizia ! ' Et il se couvrit la tete." 

When in 1789 the firebrand of the Revolution 
set France ablaze and the emigration began, Letizia 
wrote to Napoleon to tell him to stay where he 
was. She was the Spartan mother who, having 
given her son his shield, bade him come back with 
it or upon it. 

She had need of him at home, too. In 1790 
Pascal Paoli re-entered Corsica in triumph. By 
1792 his designs to separate it from France and 
join it to England were manifest. Letizia would 
have none of them. When Napoleon did come 
home for a brief while, she inspired him, Lucien 
and Joseph — all boys in the early twenties — to de- 
clare themselves for the French. Paoli had not 
forgotten what manner of woman she had shown 
herself in that old war of independence. He sent 
her a message : " Madame, if you will write to the 
general that you disapprove of the conduct of 



182 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

your sons you shall immediately take possession of 
your confiscated property." And she answered quietly, 
" Tell Paoli I should have thought he would have 
known me better. I have made myself a French- 
woman, and a Frenchwoman I remain." 

The fact that this reply made Paoli the Bonapartes' 
implacable enemy, and caused him to order that they 
should be brought to him alive or dead, did not make 
Madame regret the course she had taken, nor deviate 
from it by a hair's-breadth. 

Her three boys were compelled to disguise them- 
selves and fly — Joseph to Bastia, Napoleon to Calvi, 
and Lucien to Marseilles. 

Madame was left alone with her children in the white 
house at Ajaccio. " You must only think of your 
mother," she had said to her sons, " when you have 
saved your country." She watched over the children 
night and day. She sat up till morning came again, 
and then lay down, dressed, to snatch a little rest. 
Every sound in the dark night, the common noises of 
the street in the long sunny day, must have made her 
think that their hour had come and Paoli's people 
were upon them. What was she to do ? Resistance 
was impossible; submission, dishonour; and flight 
almost certain death. All the while her strong heart 
was torn with anxiety for the fate of the sons she 
had given to France. 

Joseph Fesch, her half brother, was the only re- 
sponsible person she had with her, and he was younger 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 183 

than herself, and not the man she was. Presently 
an old relative consented to take charge of her two 
youngest children, Caroline and Jerome. The mother 
could very little have expected when she parted from 
them to see them again in this world. She kept with 
her Elisa, Pauline, and Louis. 

The night comes when, waking up suddenly, she 
sees her room full of armed men. She thinks they 
are Paolists, and gets up, ready for fate. But they are 
her friends. " Quick, Signora Letizia ! Paoli's people 
are close behind us. There is not a moment to be 
lost. We have come to save you or perish with you." 
She throws a few clothes on to the children, and the 
little party creep in silence with their guides through 
the sleeping town. They hear sounds of their enemies 
all about them as they pass through it. But their 
special Providence has not forgotten them, and they 
gain the mountains and the macquis in safety. Uncle 
Fesch takes care of Elisa and Louis, and Madame has 
little Pauline by the hand. The arbutus tears their 
clothes and the hands and faces of the children, whose 
cries break the ominous silence of the country. A 
brief rest is permitted on the heights of Aspreto, and 
the children lie down and sleep for a little. In the 
midst of them Madame sits upright, with her hands 
resting on her knees — thinking, thinking, thinking. 
They hear the church clock in Ajaccio strike mid- 
night. Another day has begun — and what a day ! 
In the very early morning it is Madame who gives 



184 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

the signal to start. They are hidden in the high, 
thick macquis, while a Paolist band passes them, de- 
ciding to pillage and destroy the house of Bona- 
parte, and on the death of Cotte, one of Madame's 
escort. When little Elisa cries, torn and footsore, 
" Do as I do," says the mother ; " I suffer, and am 
silent." During the day they see flames rising from 
distant Ajaccio. "It is your house which burns, 
Signora." " What does it matter ? " she answers ; 
" we can rebuild it more beautiful. Vive la France ! " 
And they push on as before. 

They come to a torrent presently, and the chil- 
dren, half asleep, are put on the back of the horse 
they have been lucky enough to obtain, and Letizia 
walks by their side. The guard are devoted to her. 
Her heroism would shame any coward into courage, 
and these are no cowards. One of them is justly 
remembered hereafter in a great man's will, written 
at St. Helena — " to Costa, of Bastelica, in Corsica, 
cent mille francs." They arrive presently at the 
country house of Millelli, but dare not stay. Does 
Madame think as they pass it of the days she spent 
there with baby Joseph, of the later days with a 
moody and despondent Napoleon ? It may be. They 
press forward again. 

History does not tell if, when they at last arrived 
at the seaport of Capitello, where Napoleon awaited 
them, or if, when they finally reached Toulon in 
safety, relief and joy robbed Madame for a moment 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 185 

of the stoicism which danger and trouble had left 
untouched. It has been well said of her by a bio- 
grapher that she was " the woman destined to sup- 
port, with the equality of her great character, all 
the surprises of happiness, and all the catastrophes of 
misfortune." Misfortune had not done with her yet. 
They were in France, it is true, and together ; but they 
had hardly any money, and no expectations of more. 

They moved shortly to Marseilles. They accepted 
there, only too thankfully, the pain de munition, 
and the very little money doled out to refugee 
patriots. Napoleon, officer of artillery, gave them 
by far the largest part of his earnings. For their 
cruel necessities his pride accepted from a comrade, 
Demasis, 30,000 francs. When they arrived they 
had only the clothes they stood up in. Madame did 
the work of their little home with her own hands. 
If she had had any friends, which she had not, she 
would have been too poor and too busy to entertain 
them. She had her portionless daughters, Elisa, 
nearly eighteen now, Pauline, fifteen, and Caroline, 
thirteen, to educate to the best of her simple ability. 
While they sat at needlework — not a little in awe, 
one fancies, of the beautiful, grave mother — she would 
tell them legends of the country they had left, brave 
stories of their dead father, and of the war in which 
he Had fought. As she had no book-learning her- 
self, she could not give them any; nor could she, 
though she did her best, give to them the natural 



186 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

soundness, justness, and clearness of her own mind, 
and that steady good sense which is worth all the 
learning in the world. It has been said that if she 
had brought up her children better, they would have 
been better in after life ; to which it may be answered 
that she trained them for good oourgeois, and not for 
the thrones of Europe. 

The low growl of the Revolution had now become a 
roar. Marseilles was declared a rebellious town, and 
the Bonapartes left it for a while, to return there 
in 1795. In '94 Joseph married Mademoiselle Clary, 
the daughter of a rich negotiant, which a little helped 
the family fortunes. Louis was aide-de-camp to 
Napoleon, Lucien an avocat at St. Maximin. Junot 
— nobody in those days — wanted to marry pretty 
Pauline ; but as Napoleon very sensibly said, " Tu 
n'as rien, elle n'a rien, quel est le total ? Rien," 
and the marriage did not come off. 

Another marriage, though, took place very shortly. 
Madame Mere distrusted Josephine from the first. 
Napoleon had not consulted her as to the step he 
was taking. Perhaps if he had she would have 
been chary of advice. She remembered the esprit de 
principauU in a little Napoleon, and knew well enough 
that the man would make his own fate, and, having 
made, abide by it without complaint. When Jose- 
phine became her daughter-in-law, Madame wrote her 
a letter, defective in spelling, certainly, but not in 
spirit, in good sense, and good feeling. Then Napo- 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 187 

leon was appointed to the command of the armies 
in Italy. The Bonaparte fortunes had risen with a 
bound. When he came to Marseilles to bid her 
good-bye, " Te voila grand general ! " said Madame. 
Can't one hear the pride and tenderness of her strong 
heart beating in the simple words ? 

The victories in Italy made Madame of consequence 
in Marseilles. The tide of fortune had turned indeed. 
In 1796, through Napoleon, the English gave back 
Corsica to France. That must have been a proud 
day for Letizia. When she joined Napoleon at Monte- 
bello, " I am to-day the happiest of mothers," she 
said. She went back presently to Ajaccio with Elisa, 
now married to M. Bacchiochi. It is not a little 
characteristic that she worked so hard in setting 
things to rights in the old white house (only narrowly 
saved from burning) that she made herself quite 
ill. The mother of the man whom Paris delighted 
to honour, and who had just been invested with 
the confidence of the Directory, wrote very simple 
letters to a friend in France asking for white cotton 
cords for curtains, and, if you can find them, eight 
arm-chairs a la mode and in damask, with never a 
word of that great son whose fame was already 
European. Was the reticence prudence ? It may 
have been. It is more likely that Madame thought 
now, as ever, that the way to win the world lay 
in each doing his duty to the best of his knowledge 
— my business is with white cotton cords for curtains, 



188 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

and yours with a kingdom. Let each of us see to 
his own. It is a theory which all women who fancy 
themselves to have Madame Bonaparte's strong- 
mindedness, with souls above homely tasks, should 
well consider. 

In 1799 Madame came to Paris, and with that 
coming began a new epoch in her life — the epoch 
of glory. Napoleon was First Consul, and to be, 
Emperor. Her other children were all married, or 
marrying, and their marriage portions were the king- 
doms of Europe. The policy of Napoleon and the 
Creole instincts of Josephine made the Imperial Court 
only second to the Royal Court of the old regime in 
Mat and magnificence. Madame herself received a 
million of revenue and the title of Altesse Imperiale, 
and was made the first Lady of the Legion of 
Honour. The Bonapartes had climbed to such a 
summit as might well make strong heads giddy. 
But one of them kept hers, and that was Madame 
herself. 

What a contrast her grave, tall figure, in its simple 
dress, must have presented at the Imperial Court to 
the supple southern grace of Josephine and the light 
prettiness of Paulette ! Madame was now about five 
and fifty years old. The snows of age had not 
touched the black hair which she wore . curling on 
her forehead, and she had still the dignified carriage 
and the stately beauty of her youth. The daughters 
and daughter-in-law were gorgeous in a thousand 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 189 

colours, outvying each other in rnodistic follies. Per- 
haps they were not too pleased when Mamma Letizia 
did appear at Court. Those clever eyes of hers saw 
so much — in fact, so much too much ! She was not 
in the least afraid — was she ever afraid of anything? 
- — of reproving their prodigal extravagance of expendi- 
ture, or their mean little squabbles over precedence 
and etiquette. At a family party one day, when 
Napoleon offered her the Imperial hand to kiss, "die 
le repoussa vivement." " Am I not your Emperor ? " 
" And I," she replied, " ami not your mother ? " And 
he kissed her hand in silence. 

If it was beyond her power, as under the circum- 
stances it might well have been beyond any human 
power, to make her children good men and women, 
she at least made them good sons and daughters. 

She was glad enough to escape from those Court 
functions to quiet Joseph, Avith whom she lived for 
a while in the Rue du Rocher. She still spoke 
French very little and very badly. Her Italian was 
the Corsican-Italian of her girlhood. She retained a 
hundred provincialisms of speech, and she would call 
her great son, Nabulione. She was perfectly free from 
self-consciousness, stately, simple, austere. She did 
not much understand a joke, and she thought badin- 
age frivolity. She managed to live for years beneath 
the shadow of a throne, the honest life of a devout 
bourgeoise, giving much to the poor, saying many 
prayers, thinking of her children, and saving for that 



190 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

time when they would need the money they flung 
royally into the gutter to-day. 

There was no stronger characteristic in Madame 
Mere than her profound distrust of Empire. She was 
not at the coronation of 1804. She always fore- 
saw that day when vaulting ambition would o'erleap 
itself, and the Bonaparte star would set in a great 
gloom. 

She remonstrated with her Emperor in very plain 
terms where she thought remonstrance would do 
good. But she was too wise to think that very 
often. 

It was she who united with Josephine, whom she 
did not love, to implore from her son the life of the 
Due d'Enghien. " You yourself will be the first to 
fall into the pit you dig this day beneath the feet 
of your family," she said to him in stern prophecy. 
And she addressed to him passionate reproaches with 
strong crying and tears. She should have moved him 
if any one could in this world. She defied him, as 
it were, when she took charge of the Due's dog and 
other small possessions he left behind him, and her- 
self gave them to his family. One must needs like 
her spirit. It was always her part to defend the 
weak against the strong, and of her children, to love 
the best those who suffered most. There is but 
one occasion on record when she would seem to have 
been a time-server, and that was when, after having 
for years defended Lucien's cause against Napoleon, 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 191 

she did at last write to Lucien's wife and implore 
her, for her own sake and the sake of her children, 
to consent to that divorce on which the Emperor's 
iron will was set. 

In 1809 was consummated the divorce of Josephine. 
To Madame it seemed an " aete necessaire." Had not 
Josephine brought it largely upon herself? To a 
woman of Letizia's character, a wife who had been 
faithless to her husband when he was nobody, 
and only true to him when he was a great man, 
must have appeared peculiarly contemptible. To 
her primitive simplicity, too, a wife who had no 
children was but half a wife after all. France 
demanded the sacrifice of Josephine — and what must 
be, must be. 

Madame was wrong, no doubt. But even when 
she was wrong there was a dignity and steadiness 
about her one half admires. Josephine's tears moved 
her to tears too, but not to yielding. She was sorry 
for the woman she disliked — and whom she had 
always disliked — large-mindedly, as it were, and 
without any petty spite. 

But she signed the document in that illiterate 
writing of hers, with a firm hand not the less. 

For her, the new Empress, daughter of the Haps- 
burgs, was not the descendant of many kings but 
the wife of her husband. When Marie Louise gave 
herself royal airs and tried to patronise Madame Mere, 
Letizia paid her back, with perfect composure, in her 



192 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

own coin. It is only necessary to look at the portraits 
of the Empress and the Emperor's mother to know 
who had the best of that battle. 

In 1811 -Madame was one of the sponsors to her 
grandson, the King of Rome. The Empire was at its 
giddiest height of glory. The mother of the Emperor 
might have aspired to the noblest position of state to 
a kingdom. And she lived instead more retired than 
ever — many quiet charities through the agency of 
half-brother Fesch, very simple parties (doubtless 
sometimes not a little dull), a frugal court which 
consisted almost entirely of her own numerous re- 
lations. When Joseph and Louis abdicated their 
thrones, she had for them only the warmest sympathy 
and affection. Her mistrust of Empire deepened 
every day. " Nous autres Corses," she said — as she 
might well say — " nous nous connaissons en revolu- 
tions. All this will have an end, and what will 
become of those children whose imprudent extrava- 
gance looks neither to the future nor to the past ? 
Then they shall find me." 

After the campaign in Russia Napoleon accepted 
from her a million for his most urgent expenses. 
The little cloud of disaster, no bigger than a man's 
hand, which had been growing steadily since the 
divorce of Josephine, grew blacker and threatened to 
cover the sky. No misfortunes took Madame by sur- 
prise. When Fate smiled on her she saw the death's 
head behind the grin, and when it frowned she made 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 193 

herself ready for battle. Before the crashing fall of 
the First Empire she said quietly to Cambaceres, 
" I shall not complain in what manner it ends, 
provided Napoleon comes out of it without any loss 
of honour, for to fall is nothing when one ends 
nobly, but to fall is everything when one ends 
disgraced." 

Madame was sixty-four when she visited the great 
exile in Elba. She crossed from Leghorn in an 
English brig under the command of Colonel Camp- 
bell. She dined on deck every evening, and mounted 
on a cannon with "great agility" to get the first 
view of Napoleon's house. 

Once on the island she would sit at work at her 
tapestry with a little portrait of Napoleon on the table 
before her. He had been dear to her in his glory, 
but how much dearer he was in his trouble, all 
mothers must guess. That she was entirely sad need 
not be thought. That she was far happier now that 
the blow had fallen than in those gorgeous years 
when the shadow of the fall lay always upon her 
heart, may well be imagined. Here Napoleon was 
all hers — as he had hardly been since she nursed 
him, a weakly child upon her breast. Paulette joined 
them presently, proving that amid her lightness and 
follies she had still the one great Bonaparte quality 
— family affection. Letizia began presently to visit 
the objects of interest in the island. From its rocky 
shores she could see the Corsica of her youth — Bastia, 

N 



194 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

where a stern and girlish Madame Bonaparte had 
reproved a too familiar father confessor, who was very 
justly thereupon deprived of his cure. 

She, for whom the Fates had already spun so many 
surprises of disaster and glory, was not moved from 
her usual steady composure, when one moonlit night, 
the night of a ball, her son walking with her in the 
garden said to her suddenly — 

" Je vous previens que je pars cette nuit." 

" Pour aller ou ? " 

" A Paris, mais avant tout je vous demande votre 
avis." 

Her advice ! If she had thought of herself she 
must have said, " Stay here. Fame brings happiness 
to one man in a thousand, and to no woman. Here 
at least we are in peace and together. Stay." 

And she answered instead, " Go and fulfil your 
destiny." 

Madame followed her son to France, passing on 
her way close by the shores of that little native 
country she had so faithfully served. She was 
present on the 7th June 1815, when Napoleon 
received the oaths of the senators and deputies — 
beautiful still with the beauty that time cannot hurt, 
regular features, deep eyes, steady mouth, and that 
air of nobleness that comes from the soul. 

Exactly a fortnight later two women walked in 
the garden of the Elysee dressed in mourning, and 
in a sorrow which had no words. They were Madame 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 195 

Mere and Hor tense, once Queen of Holland. Waterloo 
was over. 

The last four fatal days of his abdication the 
mother spent at Malmaison with her son. What 
memories the place must have brought to him : of 
Josephine who always had his heart, and who, if she 
had been herself faithful, might have had his fidelity 
too ; of the days of a power greater than any king's 
since time began — the power of a master-mind to 
manage men. And for the mother ? " My mother 
is worthy of all venerations," said Napoleon. She 
put herself on one side. That had been her attitude 
in prosperity — and hers the true greatness willing to 
make itself of no account. She only remembered 
now the needs of her son. She must be strong to 
help him. It was the supreme crisis of life, and they 
both must come through it "with honour." What 
words of pious comfort from her own steadfast, simple 
religion the mother uttered, history does not tell. 
If she gave counsel for the future, or bade her son 
look back for consolation on a past more glorious 
than any other had achieved or would achieve, is not 
known. When the day of farewell came, the few 
faithful friends remaining to the Emperor said good- 
bye, and left weeping. The mother and son were 
alone. Two tears stole down Madame's beautiful old 
face. "Adieu, mon fils." Happy he who does not 
recognise from some experience of his own the 
desolation in those three words ! 



196 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

A few days later Madame wrote to the Cardinal 
Consalvi, " I am indeed the mother of sorrows." On 
the 15 th of July she arrived with faithful Joseph 
Fesch in Rome. A little later she wrote and begged 
the allied sovereigns to allow her to join her son in 
St. Helena. The request was refused. The woman 
accused of avarice offered the Emperor her whole 
fortune. And when it was suggested to her that she 
would be ruined, she looked up with a fine flash of 
her brave old spirit and said, " What does it matter ? 
When I have nothing I will take a staff and beg an 
alms for the mother of Napoleon." 

She wrote later again to the allied sovereigns to 
implore her son's release from that death by slow 
torture, St. Helena. They did not even reply. She 
had to content herself in those long days with 
recalling little traits of the childhood and infancy 
of that dear Nabulionello. 

She lived very quietly, seeing very few strangers, 
the Pope sometimes, and her children constantly 
when they were in Rome. When that fair-weather 
wife Marie Louise offered to visit her mother-in-law, 
" The woman of whom you speak," said Madame 
Letizia, " cannot be my daughter. She is doubtless 
some impostor who tricks herself out with our name, 
and I do not receive impostors." Then the Emperor 
of Austria, Marie Louise's father, sent his aide-de-camp 
to Madame to announce that it was his royal pleasure 
to wait on her. The misguided messenger began in 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 197 

a loud voice, " His Majesty the Emperor of Austria, 
my master — " On which old Madame, rising to 
her full height, replied, " Go, sir, to the Emperor of 
Austria your master, and tell him that he and the 
mother of the Emperor Napoleon have nothing in 
common." 

Nor did she more easily forgive her own daughter 
for Murat's treason to Napoleon, and never accepted 
Caroline's excuses that she was not responsible for her 
husband's actions. " Madame replied, like Clytem- 
nestra, ' If you could not command him, you ought 
to have fought him.' " Where is there another woman 
with so dogged a courage of her opinions as Madame 
Mere? 

In 1821 he of whom an Englishman said that he 
"had rendered past glory doubtful and future fame 
impossible," knew that his hour had come. There is 
a strange story of a ghostly visitant to the waiting 
mother at Rome on the day and moment when the 
great spirit left the body. It was not till two months 
and a half after his death that the news of it reached 
her. She remained long " without movement, without 
voice, without tears." It was the final test of her 
heroism. " My life," she said herself, " died with the 
death of the Emperor. Then I renounced everything 
for ever." When Dr. Antommarchi came to see her 
with the news of those last days in St. Helena, her 
emotion was so great he dared not tell her all. When 
he came a second time, she was calmer. She inter- 



198 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

rupted hini now and then with sobs. " I stopped. 
She dried her tears and resumed her questions." On 
his third visit she had regained that self-mastery 
which had stood her in noble stead through almost 
every vicissitude of human experience. 

On the 15th of August 1821, she wrote to the 
Marquis of Londonderry, the Minister of Foreign 
Affairs for England, to beg the remains of her son. 
" The mother of the Emperor Napoleon reclaims 
from his enemies the body of her son. Fallen 
from the summit of human greatness to the lowest 
degree of misfortune, I do not seek to move the 
British Ministry by the record of the sufferings of its 
great victim. . . . Can the English Government 
continue to extend its iron arm over the corpse of 
a foe ? I demand the ashes of my son : no one has 
a greater right to them than a mother. . . . He has 
no further need of honours — his name is sufficient 
for his glory — but I have need to embrace his dead 
body. Far away from the tumult of the world I 
have prepared a grave for him in a humble chapel. 
In the name of justice and humanity, I implore 
you not to refuse my prayer. ... I have given 
Napoleon to France and to the world ; in the name 
of God, in the name of all mothers, I come to 
beg you, my Lord, that I may not be denied my 
dead son." 

If it be suggested that this was not the composition 
of an unlettered hourgeoise, it may be answered that 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 199 

there is no finer language than the passionate utter- 
ance of the heart, and no better teacher of style than 
a great emotion. 

Madarae's request was refused. She did not live 
to see that day when the ashes of Napoleon were 
placed, as he had desired, on the banks of the Seine 
and in the midst of the French people he had so 
dearly loved. From the date of that refusal the 
mother asked nothing. The sun had set, and the 
shadows of the evening were about her path. For 
her had come the time of resignation, of far thoughts, 
of many memories, of many prayers. What a long 
twilight it was to that gorgeous day ! " Paulette bien 
aimee" died at Florence in 1825, and Saveria, the 
gouvernante of the days in old Ajaccio, in the same 
year. A very slight old figure always dressed in black 
in the fashion of the Empire, and with dark eyes still 
very bright and penetrating, became well known in 
Rome, going daily to mass, or walking sometimes 
among the ruins. She was living, too, in the ruins 
of her own life. The King of Rome died in 1832. 
Perhaps because Fate had already hit her so hard, that 
blow seemed by comparison light. All she lived for 
now was to do good. She was very fond of a young 
granddaughter, Princess Charlotte. When she became 
too blind and infirm to do much else, her faithful com- 
panion, Mademoiselle Rose Mellini, would read to her by 
the hour together. Oh, what thoughts must have lain 
behind those sightless eyes as the old woman listened 



200 THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

to the history she had helped to make, to lives and 
memoirs of that great man whose life and memory 
she kept, like another mother, hidden in her heart ! 
She dictated indeed some of her own Souvenirs — very 
simple, very short, very homely — as if she would say, 
" I am nothing, but for what I remember of the baby- 
hood of the man I gave the world, hear me a little." 
She recalled too a memory of Elba, and the fatal 
news of the Emperor's death. That is all, almost. 
She was old, but not yet to die. Heaven help her ! 
when she said of herself, " My son died miserably 
far from me : my other children are proscribed. 
. . . My grandchildren, who promised best for the 
future, all seem destined to disappear. I am old, 
forsaken, without glory, without honour — and I 
would not change places with the first queen in the 
world." 

There spoke, if there ever spoke, the spirit of a 
great woman. 

At last, on the 2nd of February 1836, at nearly 
fourscore years and ten, having known France as con- 
queror, enemy, friend, kingdom, chaos, republic, the 
empire of her own son and Bourbon kingdom again, 
and having experienced the extremes of poverty and 
riches, of obscurity and glory, of flattery and contempt, 
died Madame Mere. 

By her bedside were his Eminence Cardinal Fesch, 
whom a little Mademoiselle Ramolino had nursed as 
a baby, and Jerome, her youngest born. She went 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 201 

to death exactly as if she had gone to sleep. She 
had worked so hard she must needs be glad to 
rest at last. In the cameo by Coquille, taken 
the day after, the serene and firm old face wears a 
smile. 

The Government of Italy, not to offend France, 
commanded a very simple funeral. That was as 
Madame had wished. It would not permit the Bona- 
parte arms on the door of the mortuary chapel. But 
on the pall beneath the spreading wings of the im- 
perial eagle was inscribed-: — 

L. R B. 

Mater Napoleonis. 

Not all the flattering lies on costly monuments, 
nor the finest eulogies of court sycophants, could have 
made a nobler epitaph. 

What was this woman ? Her figure stands unique 
in history. One knows of no other at once so clever 
and so wise, so great and so willing to be little. This 
was she who, in a position of power, neither managed 
nor intrigued — who was so self-effacing that posterity 
has effaced her too, and forgotten her pluck like a 
man's, her strong courage to act where action would 
do good, and her finer courage to sit still when action 
was useless. Her iron will and dogged mind were 
hardly womanly perhaps. This was not the gentle 
angel of the domestic hearth with the tender virtues 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 

to soothe and bless — but the heroine to fight the 
world for her children, to die for them, if need be, 
with her face to the foe, or — a harder thing — to work 
for them all day long, to bring them up honestly 
in bitter poverty, and decently, in that " universal 
corruption of manners " which attained its height in 
the Revolution. 

Deep and stern in her affections — love is not what 
you feel for your children but what you do for them 
— Madame Mere was a better man than any of her 
sons, save one ; yet never forgetting that her sex is 
" an inferior part of the creation," she obeyed, as 
her noblest duty, not only Charles, husband and 
master, but her son Joseph as head of the family, 
and Napoleon, born with the right divine to rule the 
world. 

As for the charges that have been brought against 
her, they may well be admitted. 

Penurious ? Yes. Madame had been through 
such poverty as no one can experience and forget. 
Mean even ? To herself, but to her children and the 
poor most generous ; always saving, but always to give 
away. Ignorant ? Absurdly ignorant : letters written 
by some one else and signed with difficulty " Madre " ; 
preposterously ignorant of everything but life and the 
art of living rightly. Unpolished ? Rough. See Cor- 
sica to-day, and it will be easy to understand that 
the noble families of the Corsica of a century and a 
half ago would be rough. Manners defective. No wit 



THE MOTHER OF NAPOLEON 203 

herself and suspicious of wit in others. No small talk. 
No gracious flatteries. 

In short, Madame Mere was not a great lady but 
a great woman. 

As that, and the mother of a greater man, she may 
be well content to go down the ages. 



MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

When Napoleon said that reading Madame de 
Sevigne was like eating snowballs, when Horace 
Walpole worshipped at the shrine of such a grace, 
softness, and delicacy, when old Mary Montagu 
characterised the whole correspondence as " always 
tittle-tattle," and Lord Chesterfield deigned to ad- 
mire its " ease, freedom, and friendship," each critic 
had no doubt a little right on his side, and the 
truth lies somewhere between them all. 

Marie de Rabutin Chantal, who is to this day a 
religion among all Frenchmen, and was herself 
French, not only by birth, but by every instinct 
and quality of her character, was born on a certain 
day in February 1626. Her father died when she 
was a baby, her mother when she was only seven 
years old, so that the little creature knew nothing in 
her own childhood of the maternal affection which 
she was to turn hereafter into a fine art, and which 
was to make her a name for ever. 

Her uncle, Abbe of Coulanges, brought her up in 
the country quiet of his priory at Livry. What a 
fresh breath of spring this gay, soft, quick, bright 
little French girl must have brought into that 




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MADAME DE SEVIGNE 205 

studious atmosphere of mystic piety, and to the 
grave Jansenist philosophers, my uncle's companions ! 
She had Menage and Chapelain for her tutors. She 
learned Latin, Spanish, Italian, and wore the weight 
of learning now, as she wore it all her life, " lightly 
like a flower." She was only sixteen, with the in- 
nocence of that calm life still upon her, when she was 
presented at the brilliant court of Anne of Austria 
and received with a truly Gallic transport and 
enthusiasm. She had those " yeux bleus qui revent 
en regardant." She had " cette fleur printaniere de 
teint." She had the sweetest brightness, naturalness, 
charm. She was so fresh and so gay, so kind, happy, 
and girlish. All her biographers are in love with her. 
They would not be French if they could refuse to 
adore such a divinity. It is only one of them who 
suggests that she could have needed anything to 
complete her perfection — and that the deepening 
touch of sorrow. 

It came to her — do not all the worst troubles of 
life come this way ? — through herself. She was not 
yet two years away from her priory when she fell 
quite romantically and absorbingly in love. She had 
a very pretty dot — but then she had such a pretty 
wit and such a pretty face that she did not need 
its superfluous attraction. M. de Sevigne was brave, 
handsome, a soldier, and at the moment himself 
delightfully in love. Did any one whisper to Marie 
his character of amant volage ? Perhaps. Can't one 



206 MADAME DE SfiVIGNE 

fancy the charming indignation with which she re- 
pudiated such a calumny, and, if the convenances 
permitted the lovers a little more intimacy than is 
permitted French lovers nowadays, going to him 
and telling him, and listening to him and loving 
him and believing in him a thousand times more 
than ever ? One may be quite sure that Marie's 
passion was not the less blind because she was a 
clever woman. Her uncle, too, approved of the 
match. Everybody approved of it. The sun shone 
on it with that cloudless brilliancy that comes before 
the rain. And they were married. 

For a year or two, perhaps, Madame — such a girlish 
Madame — found, if not the complete realisation of 
her dreams, at least, one hopes, that happiness which 
is " the perpetual possession of being well deceived." 
Monsieur introduced his wife into the Salon of 
Madame de Rambouillet, and the young pair moved 
in a world lit by such various stars as Bossuet, 
Moliere, Pascal, Corneille, Fenelon, Boileau, Racine, 
Rochefoucauld, and Bourdaloue. Marie, indeed, who 
was familiar with the works of Ariosto and Tasso, had 
tasted Virgil and Homer, and listened from a child 
to Chrysostom " with his glorious mouth of gold," was 
no unfit companion for the immortals. Her learning, 
one may be quite sure, did not make her dull and 
pedantic. She had the exquisite taste, the perfect 
tact, the esprit and the spirituality which make a 
cultivated Frenchwoman the most delightful woman 



MADAME DE SEVIGNfi 207 

in the world. If the immortals did not yet recognise 
a peer, they were all more or less in love with such 
a charming personality. They wrote her sonnets and 
worshipped her. They took the little, fair, kind hand 
and kissed it, as it were. Her name was on all lips. 
It was only the scandals of a scandalous age which 
contained no mention of her ; for the girl- wife looked 
over the brilliant world at her feet at the husband 
of whom it was said, " II aimait partout," and still 
loved and believed in him. 

She was a little bit glad, perhaps, all the same, 
when he left Paris — and temptation — and took her 
to Les Kochers, his seat in Brittany. Madame had 
a taste, most unfashionable, for country sights and 
sounds. The sombre garden, with its long avenues 
of old trees and dark hedges of holly and thorn, did 
not seem dismal to her. She invested the solemn 
house, with its long silent salons, with the charm 
she brought everywhere, with gaiety even. Here at 
least Monsieur was all her own. They were re- 
trenching their expenses, which was just as well, 
and showed how happy one could be modestly and 
simply. A tender hope was dawning in her girlish 
heart, which found realisation when a little son lay 
on her breast. A year later, her daughter — " the 
unique passion of my life," the child more beloved 
than any child in all history — came to crown her 
blessings. One likes to think of her thus — with her 
husband faithful, or at least not known faithless, 



208 MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

with the babies getting more and more wonderful and 
intelligent every day, with the gardens blooming with 
summer life, with the world lying fair before her. 
Her happiness did not last very long. Is it in the 
nature of such happiness to last ? One must be 
thankful to have even sipped the cup. Monsieur 
was called to his regiment by the war of the Fronde, 
and Madame came back to Paris — to its brilliancy and 
dangers, to its lightness, passions, temptations — just as 
the boy Louis XIV. was entering it in triumph with 
his mother and Mazarin. 

It was in Paris that Madame met again Bussy 
Rabutin, her cousin, and that Monsieur fell under 
the spell — a spell all Madame's girlish charms could 
not break — of Ninon de l'Enclos. Cousin Bussy had 
made before this the finest protestation of love for 
Marie, it seems, and had been laughed at a little, 
so that it was not very wonderful that he now felt it 
his duty to acquaint her with her husband's unlucky 
infatuation. She received the news with not a little 
dignity. If Bussy hoped she would now lend a more 
ready ear to his own vows and fervours he must have 
been very much disappointed. In an age when gallan- 
try was the mode, this woman's character was always 
in the pure air beyond suspicion. There is, indeed, 
no higher tribute to it than Bussy's own malicious 
account of his cousin in his Histoire Amoureuse des 
Gaules. The defamer can find nothing to defame. 

Madame took Monsieur's madness in silence. Did 



MADAME DE SEVIGNE 209 

she suffer greatly ? Who knows ? She acted, at 
least, with a judgment and sanity that not one 
woman in a hundred would have displayed in her cir- 
cumstances, and only left Monsieur presently through 
the urgent advice of her more than father, the Abbe 
de Coulanges. She took the children back to Les 
Rochers, and was not, one hopes, all unhappy. As 
she played with them in the summer gardens, ugly 
rumours of her husband must, indeed, too often 
have disturbed her peace. At length came the news 
of another infatuation, of a duel, of a mortal wound ; 
and Madame wrote to the man who had wronged her 
that letter with a cry in it — that letter of " sorrow, 
despair, and pardon" — and found herself a widow at 
five-and-fewenty. 

She spent the next three years in retirement with 
her little son and daughter. They lived in the greatest 
simplicity to repair the fortunes Monsieur had ruined. 
The Abbe helped Madame a good deal, and she stayed 
with him often. She administered the estates of 
Bourbilly and Les Rochers with that shrewd and prac- 
tical common-sense, which in Frenchwomen, and in 
very few other women in the world, is compatible 
with all the most unpractical of graces and charms. 
And then she reappeared at Court. 

It was an epoch. She was not yet thirty years 
old. If she had lost something of the dewy fresh- 
ness of the girl — only her biographers say that she 

never lost it, but remained softly young for ever — 

o 



210 MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

she had gained in wit, in confidence, in sympathy. 
She had further cultivated her mind in the long 
solitudes at Les Rochers. She had suffered. She 
had had much to forgive — and had forgiven. There 
was no trace of bitterness in such a nature. She 
still loved life and wanted to enjoy it. She was 
ready to begin the world again with the happiest 
zest. She took the newest naive delight in the 
balls and parties. She knew everybody once more, 
and everybody wanted to know her. De Retz, the 
Due de Rohan, the Prince de Conde, Montrose (after- 
wards the Martyr), Madame de la Fayette, were among 
her friends. If the king for a while looked coldly 
on her, those great spirits which made the king's 
Court the most brilliant in Europe could not but 
do homage to such a cultivated womanly intelligence. 
Madame bewitched the grave bishops, very likely, 
with the exquisite " drollery " which captivated staid 
Fanny Burney more than a hundred years after. 
She moved from one great light to another. She 
always said the right thing, and said it perfectly. 
She danced gracefully, one may be quite sure, as 
she did everything. She was an amateur actress of 
not a little ability. She made the acquaintance of 
the Arnaulds, the great fathers of Jansenism. She 
went to the fashionable sermons in the intervals of 
the fashionable parties, and was moved to the softest 
emotion by those burning discourses. Conti and the 
great Fouquet (with a crowd of lesser lights long 



MADAME DE SEVIGNE 211 

forgotten) were in love with her. Of her own feel- 
ings to Fouquet it has been said that she was less 
than lover and more than friend. She followed his 
trial at least with a breathless anxiety. She came 
to Paris before its close that she might hear the best, 
or the worst, at once. " L'esperance m'a trop bien 
servie," she wrote at the last minute almost, " pour 
l'abandonner." Her gentle sanguineness lightened 
indeed this trouble for her, as it lightened all the 
other bitternesses of her life. If any man again 
touched her heart, that man was Fouquet no doubt. 
But he had a rival too powerful for him, a rival to 
whom all Madame's gentle soul had been long given, 
on whom every hope and desire of her life was fixed 
— the little daughter growing to womanhood at her 
side. 

It must have been a pretty picture when Madame 
presented la plus jolie fille de France at the French 
Court. The mother had no thoughts but for the 
child. Her own fascination and beauty were nothing 
to her. She could not think of anything but of 
Mademoiselle's loveliness, which was in point of fact 
exquisitely regular and uninteresting. One cannot 
find out, indeed, what there was in this girl, with 
her tepid disposition, her dull, exact little mind, to 
inspire an affection which in all the history of the 
human heart has scarcely a parallel. "Au premier 
moment," wrote Mademoiselle herself, with a delight- 
ful naivete, " on me croit adorable et quand on me 



212 MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

voit d'avantage on ne m'aime plus." There was, 
indeed, no reason why one should have continued to 
love her. But the maternal passion requires, it seems, 
very little from its object. Perhaps Madame's heart 
set itself so upon this child when the husband of her 
youth betrayed her. It may have been so. The date 
and reason of the origin of that supreme attach- 
ment matter, after all, very little. It has become 
immortal. 

Can't one fancy how fondly and anxiously the mother 
watched the daughter at those fine fetes and masque- 
rades ? She was not a bit pleased when the great 
people flocked about her. Perhaps some of her 
admirers found out that the way to gain Madame 
now (Madame was exquisitely human and had hitherto 
liked flattery and admiration a little on her own ac- 
count) was to admire her daughter. One does not 
know when the mother first found out — or if she 
ever found out — that Mademoiselle had judged herself 
rightly, and that her dull beauty soon bored people 
and that, though she attracted admiration, she could 
not keep it. It was certainly not very long before 
Madame was wondering over la bizarrerie du destin, 
in the difficulty of marrying the prettiest girl in 
France. Was it because the noble houses were afraid 
of making an alliance with a family not in too good 
favour with the omnipotent king (one must re- 
member Madame's firm friendship with the disgraced 
Fouquet); or because the mother's gentle sensibilities- 



MADAME DE SEVIGNE 213 

had been too much attracted by the unpopular Jan- 
senism ; or because only of the tMeur natitrelle 
of Mademoiselle's disposition ? One may be quite 
sure that the last was not the reason Madame 
assigned for her disappointment. 

The pair went into the country presently ; and 
then were recalled to Paris by the gorgeous fetes 
given to Madame de Montespan after the Peace of Aix- 
la-Chapelle. The morality of the age was such that 
the most careful of mothers would not have hesitated 
to introduce the most innocent of daughters into 
society which was not questionable, because of its 
evil manner of life there was no question at all. 
"When the king discovered Mademoiselle's beauty and 
danced with her, could Madame help being nattered ? 
The admiration was only a pretence, it turned out, 
to cloak a real passion for the Montespan; and it 
was not very long before the Court heard one morn- 
ing that Mademoiselle was to be married to a Comte 
de Grignan, who was rich, forty years old, and had 
had two wives already. 

It was not a love match, to be sure. Had Madame's 
own experience of love matches been so happy that 
she should wish her daughter to follow her example ? 
Since one must marry, it seemed, or be buried alive 
in a convent, the Comte was, everything considered, 
as good a parti as Mademoiselle was likely to get. 
Most of his relations had obligingly died, said Madame 
gaily in a letter, which was really most good-natured 



214 MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

of them. The Conite was well off. Mademoiselle was 
quite passive and indifferent. And — and — Madame 
had every reason to hope that her son-in-law might 
obtain an influential post at Court, and that she might 
keep her daughter with her in Paris. 

It is to the death of that hope that one owes one 
of the most famous series of letters ever written. 

Madame had been a correspondent of some little 
repute before this. Her letters to other persons have 
at least traces of the carefulness which was character- 
istic of an age when letter- writing was a fine art. But 
in the letters which have made her celebrated for ever 
she had no thought of celebrity. It was the mother 
talking to the child. It was the intimacy of the fire- 
side — of the most simple and domestic of all affections, 
" Madame cause." 

She wrote from " chez Monsieur Rochefoucauld," or 
from Vichy, where she was taking the waters. She 
wrote night and morning, that there might be no post 
which did not bring a letter from her. Could Madame 
de Grignan have been a hundredth part as eager to 
hear from her mother as her mother was eager not to 
miss a single chance of writing? She wrote to-day 
in May-time from the garden of Uncle Coulanges at 
Livry to the music of nightingales ; from the coin 
du feu in winter at Les Rochers ; from her dearest 
friend's, Madame de la Fayette. She went straight to 
her escritoire (and the " ebony cabinet for pens and 
paper," which Horace Walpole cherished long after as 



MADAME DE SEVIGNE 215 

a memory of the most delightful woman in the world) 
when she came home from a court ball, " at five 
o'clock in the morning." She was never tired or too 
dull to talk a little with that dear daughter. As her 
easy pen ran over the paper, the distance between 
them dwindled into nothing. The mother sat again 
with her fond hand upon the child's — with her fond 
eyes looking up into the girlish face — " Madame 
cause." 

She wrote about everything — and about nothing. 
About the balls and the comedies at St. Germain ; 
who had asked after Madame de Grignan, and had 
praised her beauty and her disposition. Here was a 
little criticism of a modish poet or painter, and half a 
page about Madame de Grignan's health. " Votre 
maigreur me tue," says the mother, and " Conservez- 
vous, c'est ma ritournelle continuelle." She had a 
charmiDg little Court scandal to tell her daughter the 
next morning ; or an account to give her of La 
Valliere at the Carmelites. She confessed to her 
with a most bewitching humility her passion for 
les vieux romans. She was folk de Corneille, she 
said. She had been to hear a " delicious " sermon 
(the adjective is perfectly characteristic) of Bour- 
daloue's this morning, and to Court at night. She 
had a little argument with her daughter about faith 
and philosophy — the mother being all for faith, blind, 
complete, devoted, and the daughter all for indepen- 
dent and reasonable thought. Here she was writing 



216 MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

of Madame de Maintenon's unique position, " II n'y en 
a jamais eu et il n'y en aura jamais;" or reading St. 
Augustine " with transport." Now she was laughing 
softly over the peccadilloes of her scapegrace son ; or 
describing the death-bed of the Princess de Conti. 
The daughter wrote solemn maxims on hope and 
patience and sent them to her mother, and the 
mother, who to the end of her life was much the 
younger of the two, wrote back to lightly chide the 
daughter about neglecting her dress and appearance. 
Of Rochefoucauld's maxims, said Madame, " II y en a 
divines ; " and also wanted Madame de Grignan " to 
put her nose a little into the Book of the Predestina- 
tion of Saints." And then again she was talking just 
as she must have talked in life, of nothing, nothings 
nothing ; of trifles lighter than air ; of things that 
were great then, or great to her, and are less than 
trifles now, with an immortal name shining here, and 
just once or twice a priceless glimpse of history — and 
again nothing, nothing, nothing. " Madame cause." 

It is this nothingness which made Napoleon say 
with perfect truth that one is no further on when one 
has read her. But it is also this nothingness which 
has endeared her to many generations of French 
people, and by which she still makes her appeal to 
the heart. 

Madame wrote, in fact, in the " little language " of 
love. She spoke to her daughter about home and 
children, the trifles of every-day life — and behold ! it 



MADAME DE SEVIGNE 217 

is what the simplest mother among her readers might 
say in substance, though not in form, to her own 
child. Madame's fears for her daughter's health and 
safety are only the echoes, after all, of anxieties 
every human being has felt for some one dear to him. 
In her partings, one relives one's own. The desola- 
tion of those good-byes, the hopelessness of the long 
outlook when they are said, the trembling anticipa- 
tions of reunion (trembling, for fear Fate should be too 
cruel, and one should meet no more), is there any one 
so happy — or is it so miserable ? — that he has not 
known these things as she knew them ? Did she 
write of the narrowest coterie only ? Did she write 
pages and pages of the " tittle-tattle " of " a fine lady " 
or an " old nurse " ? Did she write a great deal too 
fast (her pen had always le bride stir le cote, she 
said), as well as much too often, and never re-read 
what she had written ? If she had soared to the 
finest flights of eloquence, if she had only told what 
would be valuable to the historian and the biographer, 
if she had omitted volumes almost of her tender feeling 
for her child, and put in a fuller account of those 
great spirits among whom she lived, she would have 
been a much greater genius and much less beloved. 
Her sensibilities could not but interfere a little with 
her wit. A great attachment was not with her, any 
more than with any other woman, a stimulus to great 
enterprises. She rested in it and was content. 

Her letters have been, indeed, well called the 



218 MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

" Book of Repose." It is into the quiet place of the 
most natural of all the affections that she leads one 
through a vicious society and a vicious age, and in 
the most charming, simple, easy manner imaginable. 
It is the classic cles portcs fermees which she has 
written ; the classic of that " home " for which the 
Frenchman has no word and such an infinite devotion. 
Does her soft delicacy bore one now and then ? Do 
those pages of graceful trifles become occasionally a 
little monotonous, and the easy writing almost irri- 
tating in its dainty perfection ? It is to be supposed 
that at times most readers have felt this. And there 
come other times when that soft and limpid French, 
when the charm of the writer's personality, her gentle 
sprightliness, and, above all, her one long, fond, supreme 
affection, make the book into a friend who lives. 

How many years did Madame continue writing 
those letters ? Monsieur de Grignan was made Vice- 
Governor of Provence, and presently Madame had 
little grandchildren to think about and to love. Her 
son fell a victim to the charms of the same siren who 
bewitched his father ; and Madame took his follies 
with the softest gaiety and nonchalance. He only 
" amused and interested " her in fact. She had not 
room in her heart for a second great passion. She 
was a little bit vexed with him when he cut down 
the timber at Buron ; and, when he formed a fleeting 
attachment for La Champmele, she spoke gaily of 
the actress as ma helle-fille. She must have been still 



MADAME DE SEVIGNE 219 

more softly amused when mon fils, having sown so 
plentiful a crop of wild oats, settled down, married an 
heiress, and became devot and austere extremely. 

In her own later years Madame herself fell more 
and more under the sway of the quiet fatalism of 
the mystic Jansenist religion, to which she had 
been first drawn as a girl. She formed a great 
friendship with Corbinelli. When she was a cUvote, 
he was a mystic. One can't imagine that her 
devotion could ever prevent her being a charming 
social power — bright, tactful, and sympathetic to 
the last hour of her life. When did she find out 
for certain, or had she been always sure, that she 
was not exempt from the fate of almost all mothers 
and had cared for her daughter a thousand times 
more than her daughter had cared for her ? She 
was seventy years old when she came to nurse 
Madame de Grignan through an illness. One is 
glad to think she was not eating her heart out 
in a piteous anxiety hundreds of miles away; de- 
pending on undependable posts, and waiting — with 
that cold dread which such a waiting brings — for 
the worst. Her tender nursing restored her daughter 
to health. Then she herself caught a virulent small- 
pox. Could she have chosen, if she might have 
chosen, a better death than to die in the service 
and by the side of the child she had so abundantly 
loved ? 

The passion for Madame de Sevigne is, at least 



220 MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

among the French, a passion for the woman as 
much as for her works. And indeed one knows no 
more lovable person. 

To think of Madame is to think of a fascination 
beside which beauty leaves one cold. This was 
the woman who always knew the happiest thing to 
do, and did it delightfully. She had brilliancy which 
never offended other people's dulness, and learning 
which never made the stupid feel ignorant. She 
would sympathise with one divinely over a lost toy 
or a lost hope. She could not help laughing just 
where she ought to have laughed; and dissolved 
into the most bewitching and the most natural of 
tears when dull persons read her their dull tragedies. 
She was so human too — so exquisitely human — that 
when the king danced a minuet with her she im- 
mediately discovered him to be the best of monarchs 
and of men. Wouldn't one like to have met her, 
to have talked with her, to have looked up into 
that soft sparkling face, to have been admitted to 
that kind intimacy, to that impulsive, faithful friend- 
ship ? There have been greater and better women, 
no doubt, but in the whole world not one so 
delightful. 

Was Madame profound ? By no means. She was 
light, says one of those biographers who loved her, 
in all her emotions, save one. She took her religion 
even — and she took a good deal of it — lightly. It 
affected her sensibilities rather than her soul. She 



MADAME DE SEVIGNE* 221 

found, as one has seen, the most awful denuncia- 
tions of the old preachers cUlicieuses, life sometimes 
rather desobligeante, death yet more ill-natured, and 
ended, " Mais parlous d'autre chose." That was her 
philosophy. 

As for the vice of the times, through which her 
own fair virtue passed unstained, she accepted its 
existence with the same gracious tact as she accepted 
the existence of other foolish fashions. Madame 
only laughed a little at failings, even in her own son, 
now considered more or less serious. If she was in 
many respects superior to her age, she had no un- 
comfortable airs of superiority. When the other 
women of fashion flocked to see the loathsome end 
of the poisoners, La Voisin and De Brinvilliers, 
Madame went too ; blithely wrote an account of 
the scene to her daughter, and felt, it seems, for 
all those tender susceptibilities, scarcely a touch 
of pity. 

Neither are her writings the writings of the woman 
who takes deep views of life. " L'exces de la negli- 
gence etouffe la beaute," said she. " La grande amitie' 
n'est jamais tranquille." " Les longues esperances usent 
la joie comme les longues maladies usent les dou- 
leurs." She has hardly a profounder saying. But 
how many people, after all, have room in their 
hearts for more than one great feeling at a time ? 
Madame's was for her child. 

To recall her after more than two hundred years 



222 MADAME DE SEVIGNE 

is to recall the perfume of garden roses, or the 
melody of the most delicious drawing-room music. 
On every page of those old letters she has left the 
scent of her robes and the magic of a sweet presence. 
As to her genius, there may be many opinions ; but 
as to the woman, French of the French, true daughter 
of that delightful, bright, kind, witty, tactful and 
light-hearted nation, there can be but one. 



MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 

Just a century and a half ago was born in old Paris 
a little girl, who was to immortalise by her talent 
not only herself, but almost all the crowned heads 
of Europe. Her father was a painter ait pastel, and 
of charming little pictures in the Watteau manner. 
He was, too, very good company with a taste for 
very bad ; and Madame Vigee his wife was charm- 
ingly pretty, pious, and prudent. 

Mademoiselle Elisabeth Louise was an artist at 
six years old. She was born an artist, one should 
rather say. At the convent school she drew in 
her copy-books, on the walls — everywhere — to the 
horror of the nuns, no doubt, and the delight of 
that impulsive Bohemian, her father. She was about 
seven when she sketched a la lampe a Man with a 
Beard, and M. Vigee, looking at it cried, " transported 
with joy," " Tu seras peintre ou jamais il n'en 
sera ! " 

Elisabeth was rather a plain little girl, with a 
thin face and great deep eyes. " Later on, I be- 
came pretty," she says with her adorable naivete! 
One cannot fancy that her own beauty, or want of 
it, was at any time of the first moment to her. 



224 MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 

It was other people's for which she was always 
looking. 

She was only about thirteen when that charming, 
gay, easy-going father died, with some shadow of the 
awful times that were coming upon his country, 
falling across even his light heart. The child 
mourned him tenderly. He had been more to her 
than her mother was. Her little brother was three 
years younger than herself. The household was a 
very poor one. The girl artist turned to her easel 
for her hope and happiness in life. Her talent 
was, as any true talent must be, the best refuge 
against all troubles, a work and an interest for 
ever. She had a companion who painted with 
her. One can fancy the little Elisabeth in the 
white frock she always wore, fragrantly girlish, and 
with that grace and sweetness which she put into 
all her pictures, growing daily into her own face 
and character. 

Her talent began to be talked of, and brought her 
presently the acquaintance of Vernet, who told her 
to follow no school — only Nature, " the first of all 
masters." She copied some of those exquisite tStes 
de jeunes filles of Greuze. She painted one portrait, 
and then another, and another. It was evident she 
had had no master. She was always herself. She 
had unspoiled her own great gift of seeing loveli- 
ness fresh from the Divine Finger, through ridiculous 
fashions of dress, and much more disfiguring fashions 



MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 225 

of thought and of conduct. She was soon earning 
so much money that it seems hardly necessary for 
her mother to have married a very rich and objec- 
tionable person called Le Sevre, to retrieve the poor 
little Le Vigee fortunes. The great ladies of the 
Court and of the Faubourg St. Germain began to 
call on the artist. She painted one of their number, 
the Duchesse de Chartres. Kindly old Madame 
Geoffrin was among her visitors. In a word, Made- 
moiselle was the mode. 

She was asked out soon into the very highest 
society. She was not only a charming artist, she 
was a charming girl. The old thinness that spoiled 
her childish face had gone. She had the bloom and 
the freshness of a flower, curling hair, sweet eyes, 
tender mouth. She had the innocence of a life spent 
entirely in devotion to one pure passion. She had 
hardly any thoughts beyond it. She had never read 
a novel She was very naive and gently gay, with 
a kindly little sense of humour, and a blithe little 
girlish heart. 

She gave up going out to dinners presently. It 
took up so much time and wasted precious day- 
light ! Mademoiselle herself tells the story of how 
one day when she was just ready to dine out, 
in her very best blue satin frock, she ran back 
to her studio to look at a portrait just begun — 
and sat down on a chair in front of her easel on 

her wet palette — "which made me resolve," says 

P 



226 MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 

she, in her direct little manner, " de ne plus accepter 
que les soupers." 

She was hardly twenty years old when her mother 
pointed out to her the advisability of her marrying a 
certain Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, painter. M. Le 
Brun was very lively and good-natured, extravagant, a 
gambler — and worse. Shall I marry him ? Marriage 
might distract me from my beloved painting, which 
would be unendurable ; but on the other hand it 
would relieve me of the society of that villain beau- 
pere. All the way to church the bride was asking 
herself, " Shall I, or shall I not ? " She had a great 
deal less knowledge of the world than an ordinary 
capable modern child of twelve. The importance of 
that " No " or that " Yes " which she was about to 
utter, she certainly did not realise. But Fate whis- 
pered in her pretty ear, and she said " Yes." 

The marriage was kept secret for a time. The 
newly-made Madame went on painting as usual. Then 
the secret was revealed. M. Le Brun had discovered 
what a profitable investment a talented wife could be. 
Madame painted a host of portraits. She even began 
to teach some girls. But the pupils' ignorance wearied 
her, and their gaiety infected an instructress no older 
than they were ; so that one day when she found them 
swinging instead of applying themselves to art, she 
gave them the gravest lecture on their naughtiness, 
and then really must try the swing herself. 

Her painting absorbed her thoughts more than ever. 



MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 227 

There would have been nothing made ready for her 
little daughter on her entrance into this cold world if 
it had not been for the timely help of a kindly and 
practical friend of the girl-mother's. On the day 
the child was born Madame was working at her 
Venus Qui Lie les Ailes de l' Amour. 

It was only when that little daughter lay in her 
arms that she knew a better happiness than even 
art could give her : and in that tenderest of all pic- 
tures " Madame Vigee Le Brun and her daughter, 
painted by herself," one sees how " her work was still 
the better for her love." 

In 1779 she first painted Marie Antoinette. She 
had seen the queen before at Marly-le-Roi, walking 
in the Park with her ladies, white-frocked, gay, and 
laughing. She was now in the dazzling morning of 
her beauty. Madame could find no colours in her 
box to reproduce Vidat de son teint : no genius 
in herself to give the world any adequate idea of 
that stately carriage of the head at once sweet and 
majestic, of that expression at once proud and tender, 
of that exquisite skin which, says the artist, was so 
transparent that it took no shadows. 

After this she painted and repainted her royal 
mistress. She was the most perfect of all models. 
In 1788 Madame sent to the Salon that picture of 
the queen, with Madame Royale by her side, the 
Due de Normandie on her knee, and the first Dauphin 
standing by the side of the empty cradle. The frame 



228 MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 

of the picture alone appeared in the Salon at first. 
" Voila le deficit, disait on." And the name clung to 
the queen, with what a fatal persistence history knows. 
But the picture also inspired one of the very, very 
few happy sayings ever attributed to poor, fat, weak, 
irresolute, unlucky Louis. " I know nothing about 
painting," said he to Madame Le Brun, " but you have 
made me love it." 

Madame sang to the queen while she sat to her. 
She had the sweetest little voice in the world. When 
she was doing the portrait of Monsieur, afterwards Louis 
XVIIL, he sang to her — false. " How do you find that 
I sing, Madame Le Brun ? " said he. " Like a prince, 
Monseigneur," she answered with a very useful wit. 

In turn, she painted almost all the Royal family. 
She tried to make her models forego the monstrous 
head-dress and formal robes which were the fashion. 
For herself, she had always her white frock of muslin 
and her own curly hair, unpowdered. She put a little 
fichu over her head sometimes. She was an artist, 
body as well as soul. No customs and modes drew 
a film over her eyes, and made her think in time 
that what was usual must be beautiful. She always 
wished to draw the Marie Antoinette of Trianon in 
her country gown, with a basket in her hand, laugh- 
ing lips, fair curls — not a stately queen but a lovely 
girl. And later on, in Russia, she wanted to repro- 
duce the Grand Duchess Alexander as she first saw 
her — a Psyche watering pinks at her casement, with 



MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 229 

her hair about her neck, and a ribbon enclosing the 
roundest and supplest waist in the world. But Madame 
had fortunately so far the touch of genius, that through 
all fashion's hideousness she could draw out the 
virgin sweetness of a Madame Elisabeth, and find in 
the king's aunt, Louise-Marie-Adelaide de Bourbon, 
the tenderest grace and charm. If it be said she 
put into her portraits a beauty which the originals 
never knew, it may be answered that the beauty is 
there always in every human face, in every sunset 
and sunrise, in a kitten at play, in the red fog on 
the river, but that it needs the poet or the artist 
to see it and reveal it to a grosser world. 

Madame went to Holland with her husband : and 
on her return to Paris was received into the Royal 
Academy of Painting. In the early days of her 
marriage she lived in the Rue de Clery, and received 
there all the celebrities of art and literature and the 
great people of the Court. The hostess never flattered 
her gentle self that they came to see her. She gave 
them the best music in Paris, and besides, said she, 
they liked to talk with each other. But one may 
well believe that the finest of fine company was not 
proof against the charm of this artless artist, with her 
girlish face and that sweet singing voice, ' with its 
" silver tones " which Grety loved. After the parties 
there was the simplest of little suppers ; and by twelve 
the guests had left. Madame went out a little her- 
self, but balls — even the prim balls of the time, where 



230 MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 

eight serious persons performed a contre-danse and 
" one is not stifled as one is now " — did not please 
her. She had acted a little too — and charmingly one 
may be very sure — in comedies. She was still quite 
a young woman when she went to stay with Madame 
du Barry at Louveciennes, and found the poor, tawdry, 
shameful favourite, not at all unkindly, a little mincing 
and affected in manner, and very good to the poor at 
her gates. She was again at Louveciennes in 1789. 
Public opinion permitted in this age the association 
of the guilty with the innocent with effects by no 
means harmless. But in the case of a Vigee Le Brun, 
as in that of a Lamballe or of a Madame Elisabeth, 
it may be said that if evil company scorched her 
garments it never seared her heart. 

At the wild thunder-burst of the Revolution, Art, 
with her hands at her eyes lest they should see horrors 
which should blind them to beauty for ever, fled the 
country. Madame was of the emigration. It does 
not seem that she was unnecessarily courageous, this 
little painter. She was woman to the tips of her 
fingers. When the National Guard would have pre- 
vented her leaving Paris, " As every one is to have his 
freedom," said she, with her happy feminine wit, " I 
am going to make use of mine." She took her 
daughter with her. Her husband and brother accom- 
panied them to Trone. Madame took very little 
money. She had left nearly all she had made to 
M. Le Brun, who spent it on himself. She was as un- 



MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 231 

mercenary as a bird, and far less capable of looking 
after her own material interests. But she had a 
fortune in her fingers — the best of all fortunes, 
which necessitated work instead of exempting her 
from it. 

She went to Italy where, in Rome, she saw Angelica 
Kaufmann; and could never bring herself to believe 
that a Raphael who painted those exquisite heads of 
Virgins could have been himself libertine and carnal. 

At Florence she painted her own portrait by 
request, and still looks out from it to-day, famous 
for ever, with her palette in her hand, her canvas in 
front of her, and her face with its parted lips, half- 
gay, half thoughtful — a girl's face still. 

At Vienna she stayed two and a half years. She 
made a kind of triumphal progress about the country, 
carrying her famous " Sybil " with her. She found a 
kind world everywhere she went. She was continually 
meeting the dearest of women and the noblest of men. 
She recorded her impressions with a most charming 
naivete. Her " Memoirs " were not filled with dull 
things like dates and ages and explanation. She 
wrote, as the linnet sings, because she must. She 
had a delightful fund of anecdote, and no chronology 
at all ; a gentle little vein of satire ; a very fine sense 
of humour ; and an intuition, much more useful than 
any solemn learning, which helped her to go straight 
to the point — to find the essential and to leave the 
superfluous. 



232 MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 

On 25th July 1795, Madame arrived in Petersburg. 
She had not provided any suitable frock in which to 
be presented to her Mightiness, Catherine II. The 
Empress of all the Russias forgave the gentle painter 
her white muslin, and loved her as every one loved 
her, and could not help doing. Madame settled in 
Petersburg. She had her blue-eyed daughter growing 
up at her side. She had her art, which was more to 
her than mother or sister, brother, lover, or friend. 
The years passed her by with very swift wings. She 
was always painting and never taking count of time. 
Her portraits brought her in a more than sufficient 
income. If they brought her nothing, this was the 
artist who would rather have painted and starved than 
have lived in a king's palace, lapped in fulness, with 
her talent hidden in a napkin. She did not lay by 
for the future. She was always a little unpractical, 
and not at all far-seeing. When her daughter insisted 
on marrying the unsuitable man of her choice, Madame 
was grieved not a little, and turned to her art for 
comfort. The grief even affected her health. She 
had news from France of her mother's death; and 
started, herself, on a journey to Moscow for change 
and recovery. She went on to Potsdam and painted 
the beautiful Queen of Prussia. She had been away 
from France for twelve years when she returned to 
her house in the Rue du Gros Chenet in Paris, which 
M. Le Brun decorated to welcome her, entirely regard- 
less of the expense entailed — upon her. She was 



MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 233 

received with enormous enthusiasm at a concert. 
Greuze came to call upon her the day after her 
arrival. She was asked to breakfast with the First 
Consul. She saw all the wit, beauty, and fame of 
Paris ; and all the wit, beauty, and fame came to see 
her and her pictures. Paris, indeed, was not the Paris 
she had left. This was the city shaken by the Terror, 
and with that most curious and ominous of all inscrip- 
tions still written on its walls, " Liberty, Fraternity — 
or Death." But Paris of the Monarchy, Paris of the 
Revolution, Paris of the" Consulate, could but love this 
gentle painter of pictures, who was every one's friend, 
and in her own person essentially lovable. 

In 1802 Madame paid a visit to London. Mon 
Dieu ! but how these English are triste and kind. 
The visitor did not know a single word of their 
language. Their Sunday — their deadly, heavy, foggy 
London Sunday — especially weighed upon her gay 
French heart. She was a visitor presently at the 
most exclusive houses. The solemn magnificence of 
the great country seats at once impressed and op- 
pressed her. One can't help suspecting that the 
latter feeling rather predominated. Your English- 
men's castles, they are so comfortable and so slow ! 
When the ladies left the dining-room at dessert, they 
embroidered, says the guest, in a most beautiful 
room, without uttering a word. Madame felt, per- 
haps, as if it would be a relief to her feelings to get 
up and scream. When the men came in from their 



234 MADAME YIGEE LE BRUN 

wine and their politics, they buried themselves in 
books. More silence. The lively visitor gathered 
her courage in both hands, as it were, and proposed 
a walk in the park by moonlight ! The brief, shocked 
silence which followed this astounding suggestion may 
be imagined but not described. My Lord Moira 
replied that the windows and doors were shut for the 
night, and, in short, that it would not do at all. My 
Lad}^ Charlotte, the next morning, perhaps, took the 
visitor out driving with her. But the hard little open 
pony carts in which Englishwomen braved the winds 
and rains of their impossible climate were not at all 
to the taste of Madame of Paris. While she was in 
England she painted the Prince Regent and other 
celebrities. She stayed in the country three years ; 
and left it with a warm French gratitude for all the 
kindness she had received there, and no doubt a 
little relief that she would soon be at home in her 
France. 

She was now getting an old woman. She had 
indeed to the last day of her life a freshness and 
spontaneity which kept her heart young for ever. 

She painted Madame Murat. She travelled in 
Switzerland. Her husband, her daughter, and her 
brother preceded her through " those dark gates across 
the wild that no man knows." She bought a country 
house at Louveciennes. She enjoyed the sweetest of 
all fruits — the fruits of her own labour. To her 
had been given in full measure the crowning blessing 



MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN 235 

of existence, " to be born with a bias to one 
pursuit." 

She had a niece with her to the end, who made her 
know once more, she said, all the feelings of a mother. 
And at last death touched gently her to whom even 
life had been kind. 

Madame Vigee le Brun steps out of those portraits 
she has painted of herself and lives again for ever. 
Is she in her straw hat, with her palette in her hand, 
recently acquired by the National Gallery; or viva- 
cious, with a turban on her head, painted by request, 
for the city of Florence ? It does not matter which. 
She is most charming as a mother, with her maternity 
in her sweet eyes and the little daughter's arms round 
her neck; but not most characteristic. This is not, 
perhaps, the received type of the perfect woman, this 
tender-hearted Bohemian who did not even know how 
to sew. 

" But a more ideal artist she than all." 



THE END 



Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. 
Edinburgh &■> London 



H Classtfieb Catalogue 

OF WORKS IN 

GENERAL LITERATURE 

PUBLISHED BY 

LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 

91 and 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, and 32 HORNBY ROAD, BOMBAY 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

BADMINTON LIBRARY (THE). - 11 
BIOGRAPHY, PERSONAL ME- 
MOIRS, &c. 7 

CHILDREN'S BOOKS - 26 
CLASSICAL LITERATURE, TRANS- 
LATIONS, ETC. - 19 
COOKERY, DOMESTIC MANAGE- 
MENT, &c. 29 

EVOLUTION, ANTHROPOLOGY, 

&c. 18 

FICTION, HUMOUR, &c. - - - 21 
FUR, FEATHER AND FIN SERIES 12 
FINE ARTS (THE) AND MUSIC - 30 
HISTORY, POLITICS, POLITY, 

POLITICAL MEMOIRS, &c. - - 3 
LANGUAGE, HISTORY AND 

SCIENCE OF 17 

LOGIC, RHETORIC, PSYCHOLOGY, 

14 



PAGE 

MENTAL, MORAL, AND POLITICAL 

PHILOSOPHY 14 

MISCELLANEOUS AND CRITICAL 

WORKS 31 

POETRY AND THE DRAMA - - 20 

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND ECO- 
NOMICS 17 

POPULAR SCIENCE - - - - 24 

RELIGION, THE SCIENCE OF - 18 

SILVER LIBRARY (THE) - - 27 

SPORT AND PASTIME - 11 

PHILOSOPHICAL 



STONYHURST 
SERIES - 



&c. 



TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE, THE 
COLONIES, &c. 

WORKS OF REFERENCE - 



16 



9 
25 



INDEX 

Page 



OF 



Abbott 'Evelyn) 

(T. K.) - 

(E. A.) - 

Acland (A. H. D.) 
Acton (Eliza) - 
Adeane(J. H.) - 
Adelborg (O.) - 
iEschylus 
Ainger (A. C.) - 
Albemarle (Earl of) 
Allen (Grant) - 
Allgood (G.) - 
Angwin (M. C.) 
Anstey (F.) 
Aristophanes - 
Aristotle - 
Arnold (Sir Edwin) 

(Dr. T.) - 

Ashbourne (Lord) 
Ashby (H.) 
Ashley (W. J.) - 
Avebury (Lord) 
Ayre (Rev. J.) - 



3.19 

14.15 : 

15 I 

4 

8 
26 j 
19! 
12 j 
11 
25 

3 
29 
21 
19 

9. 20 

3 

3 

29 

3»i7 

18 

25 



Balfour (A. J.) 

Betty) 



AUTHORS 

Page) 

Buckland (Jas.) 



AND EDITORS. 



Bacon - - 7. 14, 15 
Baden-Powell (B. H.) 3 
Bagehot (W.) 7, 17, 27, 31 
Bagwell (R.) - - 3 
Bailey (H. C.) - - 21 
Baillie (A. F.) - 3 
Bain (Alexander) - 15 
Baker (l.H.) - - 31 
(Sir S. W.) - 9 



(Lady 

Ball (John) 

Banks (M. M.) - 21 

Baring-Gould (Rev. 

S.)- - - 18,27,31 
Barnett (S. A. and H.) 17 
Baynes (T. S.) - - 31 
Beaconsfield (Earl of) 21 
Beaufort (Duke of) 
Becker (W. A.) 
Beesly (A. H.) - 
Bell (Mrs. Hugh) - 
Bent (J. Theodore) - 
Besant (Sir Walter)- 
Bickerdyke (J.) - : 

Bird (G.) - 
Blackburne (J. H.) - 
Bland (Mrs. Hubert) 
Blount (Sir E.) 
Boase (Rev. C. W.) - 
Boedder (Rev. B.) - 
Bowen (W. E.) 
Brassey (Lady) 

(Lord) 

Bray (C.) - 
Bright (Rev. J. F.) - 
Broadfoot (Major W.) 
Brown (A. F.) - 

(J. Moray) 

Bruce (R. I.) - 
Bryce(J.)- 
Buck (H. A.) - 



11, 12 
19 

8 
20 

9 

3 

12,13 

20 

13 

21 

7 

5 
16 

7 
10 
12 
15 

3 
11 
26 



Buckle (H.T.)- 
Bull (T.) - 
Burke (U. R.) - 
Burns (C. L ) - 
Burrows (Montagu) 
Butler (E. A.) - 



Page 
26 

3 
29 

3 
30 

5 
24 

13 



Cameron of Lochiel 
Campbell(Rev. Lewis) 18,19 
Camperdown (Earl of) 8 
Cawthorne(Geo. Jas.) 13 
Chesney (Sir G.) - 3 

Childe-Pemberton(W.S.) 8 
Cholmondeley-Pennell 

(H.) - - - 11 
Christie (R. C.) - 31 
ChurchilK W. Spencer) 3, 21 
Cicero 

Clarke (Rev. R. F.) 
Clodd (Edward) 
Clutterbuck (W. J.) 
Colenso (R.J.) 
Conington (John) - 
Conway (Sir W. M ) 
Conybeare(Rev.W.J.) 

& Howson (Dean) 
Coolidge (W. A. B.) 
Corbin (M.) - 
Corbett (Julian S.) - 
Coutts (W.) - 
Coventry (A.) - 
Cox (Harding) 



19 

16 

18,25 



•)i5, 



Crake (Rev. A. D.) - 
Crawford (J. H.) 

(R.) - - - 

Creed (S.) 

Creiehton (Bishop) - 
Crozier (J. B.) - 
Custance (Col. H.) - 
Cutts (Rev. E. L.) - 

Dale (T. F.) - 
Dallinger (F. W.) - 
Dauglish (M. G.) 
Davidson (W. L. 
Davies (J. F.) 
Dent (C. T.) ■ 
De Salis (Mrs.) 
De Tocqueville (A.) - 
Devas (C. S.) - 
Dickinson (G. L.) - 

(W. H.) - - 

Dougall (L.) - 
Dowden (E.) - 
Dovle (A. Conan) - 
Du Bois(W. E. B.)- 
Dufferin (Marquis of) 
Dunbar (Mary F.) - 
Dyson (E.) 



26 i Ebrington (Viscount) 



Page 

26 

21 

10 

21 

4. 5, 8 

8,15 

13 

5 

12 

5 

8 

17, 18 

19 

11 

29 

4 

16, 17 

4 

31 

21 

32 

21 

5 



Ellis (J. H.) 

(R. L.) 

Erasmus - 
Evans (Sir John) 



INDEX 



Falkiner (C. L.) 
Farrar (Dean) - - i 
Fitzgibbon (M.) 
Fitzmaurice (Lord E.) 
Folkard (H. C.) 
Ford (H.) - 

(W. J.) - - 

Fountain (P.) - 
Fowler (Edith H.) - 
Francis (Francis) 
Francis (M. E.) 
Freeman (Edward A.) 
Fremantle (T. F.) - 
Fresnfield (D. W.) - 
Frost (G.) 



OF 

Page, 
4 

- 17. 21 



AUTHORS AND 

Page I 



Froude (James A.) 4,8,10,22 
Fuller (F. W.) - - 4 

Furneaux (W.) - 24 

Gardiner (Samuel R.) 
Gathorne-Hardy (Hon. 

A. E.) 
Geikie (Rev. Cunning- 
ham) 



Hunt (Rev. W.) 

Hunter (Sir W.) - 5 

Hutchinson (Horace G.) 

11, 13.31 
Ingelow (Jean) - 20 

Ingram (T. D.) - 5 

Jackson (A. W.) - 9 

lames (W.) - - 15 ' 

Jameson (Mrs. Anna) 30, 

jefferies (Richard) - 31- 

Jekyll (Gertrude) - 31 

Jerome (Jerome K.) - 22 

ohnson (J. & J. H.) 31 

"ones (H. Bence) - 25 
oyce (P. W.) - 5, 22, 31 

ustinian - - - 15 



Gibbons (J. S ) 
Gibson (C. H.)- 



Gleig (Rev. G. R.) - 9 

Goethe - - - 20 

Going (C. B.) - - 26 
Gore-Booth (Sir H. W.) 12 

Graham (A.) - - 4 

(P- A.) - - 13 

(G. F.) - - 17 

Granby (Marquess of) 13 

Grant (Sir A.) - - 14 

Graves (R. P.) - - 8 

Green (T. Hill) - 15 

Greene (E. B.)- - 5 

Greville (C. C. F.) - 4 

Grose (T. H.) - - 15 
Gross (C.) - -4,5 

Grove (F. C.) - - 11 

(Mrs. Lilly) - 11 

Gurdon (Ladv Camilla) 22 

Gurnhill (J.)' - - 15 

Gwilt (J.) - - - 25 

Haggard (H. Rider) 10,22,31 

Hake (O.) - - - 12 

Halliwell-PhillippsQ.) 9 

Hamilton (Col. H. B.) 5 

Hamlin (A. D. F.) - 30 

Harding (S. B.) - 5 

Harmsworth (A. C.) 12 

Harte (Bret) - - 22 

Harting(J.E.)- - 13 

Hartwig (G.) - - 25 

Hassall (A.) - - 7 
Haweis (H. R.) - 8, 30 

Head (Mrs.) - - 30 

Heath (D. D.) - - 14 

Heathcote (J. M.) - 12 

(C. G.) - - 12 

(N.) - - - 10 

Helmholtz (Hermann 

von) - - - 25 
Henderson (Lieut- 
Col. G. F. R.) - 8 
Henry (W.) - - 12 
Henty (G. A.) - - 26 
Herbert (Col. Kenney) 13 
Herod (Richard S.) - 13 
Hiley (R. W.) - - 8 
Hill (Mabel) - - 5 
Hillier (G. Lacy) - n 
Hime (H. W. L.) - 19 
Hodgson (Shadworth)i5, 31 



29.31 



Hoenig (F.) 

Hogan (J. F.) - 

Holmes (R. R.) 

Holroyd (M. J.) 

Homer 

Hope (Anthony) 

Horace 

Houston (D. F.) 

Howard (Lady Mabel) 

Howitt (W.) - 

Hudson (W.H.) - 

Huish (M. B.) - 

Hullah (J.) 

Hume (David) - 

(M. A. S.) 



Kant (I.) - 
Kaye(Sir J. W.) - 
Kelly (E.l- 
Kent (C. B. R.) 
Kerr (Rev. J.) - 
Killick (Rev. A. H.) - 
Kingsley (Rose G.) - 
Kitchin (Dr. G. W.) 
Knight (E. F.) - 
K6stlin(J.) 
Kristeller (P.) - 

Ladd (G. T.) - 
Lang (Andrew) 5, 11, 
18, 20, 22, 23, 
Lapsley (G. T.) 
Lascelles (Hon. G.) 
Laurie (S. S.) - 
Lawley (Hon. F.) 
Lawrence (F. W.) - 
Lear (H. L. Sidney) - 
Lecky (W. E. H.) 5, 16, 
Lees (J. A.) 
Leslie (T. E. Cliffe) 
Levett-Yeats (S.) 
Lillie (A.) - 
Lindley(J.) 
Loch (C. S.) - 
Locock (C. D.) 
Lodge (H. C.) - 
Loftie (Rev. W. J.) 
Longman (C. J.) 

(F. W.) - 

(G. H.) - 

(Mrs. C.J.) 

Lowell (A. L.) - 
Lubbock (Sir John) 
Lucan 

Lutoslawski (W.) 
Lvall (Edna) - 
Lvnch (G.) 

(H. F. B.)- 

Lyttelton (Hon. R 

(Hon. A.) - 

Lytton (Earl of) 



30 



H.) 



6, 20 



31 



Macaulay (Lord) - 6, 
Macdonald (Dr. G.) - 
Macfarren (Sir G. A.) 
Mackail (J. W.) - 9, 
Mackenzie (C. G.) - 
Mackinnon (J.) 
Macleod (H. D.) 
Macpherson (Rev. 

H. A.) - - 12, 
Madden (D. H.) 
Magnusson (E.) 
Maher (Rev. M.) - 
Malleson (Col. G. B.) 
Marchment (A. W.) 
Marshman (j.V.) - 
Maryon (M.) - 
Mason (A. E. W.) - 
Maskelyne (J. N.) - 
Matthews (B.) 
Maunder (S.) - 
Max Miiller (F.) 

9, 16, 17, 18, 23, 
May (Sir T. Erskine) 
Meade (L. T.) - 
Melville (G. J. Whyte) 
Merivale (Dean) 
Mernman 'H. S.) 
Mill (John Stuart) - 16, 



Millias (J. G.) - 

Milner (G.) - - 32 

Monck(W. H. S.) - 16 

Montague (F. C.) - 6 

Moon (G. W.)- - 20 

Moore (T.) - - 25 

(Rev. Edward) - 14 

Morgan (C. Lloyd) - 17 

Morris (Mowbray) - n 

(W.) 19, 20, 23, 30, 32 

Mulhall (M. G.) 
Murrav (Hilda) 
Myers'(F. W. H.) 



EDJTORS- 

Page 



15 

5 
15 

5 

12 
15 I 
30 

5 
10, 12 



Nansen (F.) 
\ash(V.)- 
Nesbit (E.) 
Nettleship (R. L.) - 
Newman (Cardinal) - 
Nichols (F. M.) 



Ogilvie (R.) - 
Oldfield (Hon. Mrs.) 
Oliphant (N.) - 
Onslow (Earl of) 
Osbourne (L.) - 
Paget (Sir J.) - 
Park (W.) 
Parker (B.) 
Passmore (T. H.) - 
Payne-Gallwey (Sir 

R.) - - - 12, 
Pearson (C. H.) 
Peek (Hedley) - 
Pemberton (W. S. 

Childe-) - - 8 

Pembroke (Earl of) - 12 
Pennant (C. D.) - 13 
Penrose (Mrs.) - 26 

Phillipps-Wolley(C) 11,23 
Pitman (C. M.) - 12 

Pleydell-Bouverie (E. O.) 12 



Sheppard (E.) - 
Sinclair (A.) 
Skrine (F. H.) - 
Smith (C. Fell) 

(R. Bosworth) - 

(T. C.) - - 

(W. P. Haskett) 

Somerville (E.) 
Sophocles 

Soulsby(LucyH.) - 
17 Southev (R.) - 
26 Spahr ("C. B.) - 
32 Spedding(J.) - 
Stanley (Bishop) 
10 Stebbing (W.) - 
b Steel (A. G.) - - 
"* Stephen (Leslie) 
5 Stephens (H. Morse) 
*3 Sternberg (Count 
3 Adalbert) - 

iq Stevens (R. W.) 
8 Stevenson (R. L.) 21 
" Storr (F.) 



ontinued. 

Page 



7 
13 

8 
9 
7 
5 

10 
24 
19 
32 
32 
17 
7- 14 
25 
9 
11 
10 
7 

7 

3i 

24,26 



Pole (W.) 

Pollock (W. H.) - 11, 

Poole (W.H. and Mrs.) 

Poore (G. V.) - 

Pope (W. H.) - 

Powell (E.) 

Praeger (S. Rosamond) 

Prevost (C.) 

Pritchett (R. T.) 



Proctor (R. A.) 14, 25, 28, 29 

Raine (Rev. James) - 5 

Randolph (C. F.) - 7 

Rankin (R.) - - 7, 21 

Ransome (Cvril) - 3, 7 

Ravmond (W.) - 23 

ReidlS.J.; - - 7 

Rhoades (J.) - - 19 

Rice (S. P.) - - 10 

Rich (A.) - - - 19 

Richardson (C.) - n, 13 

Richmond (Ennis) - 16 

Rickaby (Rev. John) 16 

(Rev. Joseph) - 16 

Ridley (Sir E.) - - 19 

(Lady Alice) - 23 

Riley (J. W.) - 21 
Roget (Peter M.) 



17. 25 

7 | Romanes (G.J.) 9, 16, 18, 21 

9 

14 



2 + 



(Mrs. G. J.) 
Ronalds (A.) - 
Roosevelt (T.) - 
Ross (Martin) - 
Rossetti (Maria Fran 

cesca) - - - 32 

Rotheram (M. A.) - 29 

Rowe (R. P. P.) - 12 

Russell (Lady)- - 9 

Saintsbury (G.) - 12 

Sandars (T. C.) - 15 

Sanders (E. K.) - 8 
Savage- Armstrong(G.F.)2 1 

Seebohm (F.) - 7, 9 

Selous (F. C.) - - 11, 14 

Senior (W.) - - 12,13 

Sewell (Elizabeth M.) 23 

Shakespeare - - 21 

Shand (A I.) - - 13 

Shaw (W. A.) - - 7, 31 

Shearman (M.) - 11 



12 Stuart-Wortley(A.J.) 12, 13 
24 Stubbs (J. W.)- - 7 

Suffolk & Berkshire 

(Earl of) - - 11, 12 
Sullivan (Sir E.) - 12 
Sully (James) - - 16 
Sutherland (A. and G.) 7 

(Alex.) - - 16, 32 

(G.) --- 32 

Suttner (B. von) - 24 
Swan (M.) - - 24 

Swinburne (A. J.) - 16 
Symes (J. E.) - - 17 

Tallentyre (S. G.) - 9 

Tappan (E. M.) - 26 
Tavlor (Col. Meadows) 7 
Tebbutt (C. G.) - 12 
Terry (C. S.) - 8 

Thomas (J. YV.) - 16 
Thornhill (W. J.) - 19 
Thornton (T. H.) - 9 

Todd (A.) - - 7 

Toynbee (A.) - - 17 
Trevelyan (Sir G. O.) 6, 7, 8 

(G. M.) - - 7 

Trollope (Anthony)- 24 
Turner (H. G.) - 32 

Tynda'l (J.) - - 8, 10 
Tyrrell (R. Y.) - - 19 
Unwin (R.) 32 

Upton(F.K.and Bertha) 27 
30 
19 
Wagner (R.) - - 21 
Wakeman (H. O.) - 7 

Walford (L. B.) - 24 
Wallas (Graham) - 9 

(Mrs. Graham)- 26 

Walpole (Sir Spencer) 7 
Walrond (Col. H.) - 11 
Walsingham (Lord)- 12 
Ward (Mrs. W.) - 24 
Warwick (Countess of) 32 
Watson (A. E. T.) - 11,12 
Weathers (J.) - - 32 
Webb (Mr. and Mrs. 

Sidney) - - 17 

(T. E.) - - 16, 20 

Weber (A.) - - 16 
Weir (Capt. R.) - 12 
Wellington (Duchess of) 30 
West (B. R.) - - 24 
Weyman (Stanley) - 24 
Whately(Archbishop) 14,16 



Van Dvke (J. C.) 
Virgil 



Whitelaw (R.) 
Whittall(SirJ. W. )- 
Wilkins (G.) - 

(W.H.) - - 

Willard (A. R.) 
Willich (C. M.) 
Witham (T. M.) 
Wood (Rev. J. G.) - 
Wood-Martin (W. G.) 
Wyatt (A. J.) - 
Wylie (J. H.) - 
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